[Pythonmac-SIG] Which version to use??

[Rodney Somerstein]

At 11:17 AM -0700 5/25/10, Christopher Barker wrote:
>Honestly, I don't know if the Mac is in any poorer position with 
>regard to Python 3 as any other platform.
>
>NONE of the major packages I use have been ported to Py3 on any 
>platform: numpy, SciPy, wxPython. Many of those are well supported 
>on the Mac, so I don't think there will be any issues there.

Thanks, Chris. This is the kind of thing I was trying to find out. 
After I asked the question I started reading the comp.lang.python 
newsgroup and see that lots of people seem to be in the same 
situation. There are a fair number of people wanting to USE Python 
3.x - that is, develop WITH Python 3.x. However, the people that make 
all of the tools for those of us that want to use them are not 
porting or are at least not being very public about their ports.

To someone like me, who is mostly looking in from the outside, Python 
seems like it has a lot of potential but the fragmentation of the 
development community is a bit problematic. Unless the powers that be 
decide to once and for all cease development of the 2.x branch of 
Python, I'm not sure that 3.x will ever end up having the support 
that it needs in terms of ported packages. If I had the ability to 
port something like wxPython, I would definitely do so. 
Unfortunately, that isn't the case. It seems kind of strange to start 
doing work with 2.7 when supposedly 3.1.2 is the current version. 
Does no one other than the maintainers of the language itself want 
3.x to succeed?


>>The Mac Python community seems pretty small.
>
>There are a LOT of folks using Python on teh Mac -- the community 
>that is pretty small is the community of folks doing mac-specific 
>stuff -- PyObjC, for instance. It getting to be that the the 
>fradction of development that is done for desktop apps is pretty 
>small -- and that that is done is often done with cross-platfrom 
>tools.

True. Unfortunately, the cross-platform tools like wxPython don't 
seem to be there for Python 3. I would love to use Python for some 
cross-platform application development. Packaging on the Mac, in 
particular, though, seems to be a bit iffy. Yes, there is on-going 
work on py2app. However, it seems to mostly be a one person project 
with work done as available. (A hazard of open source, I guess.)

>The only folks that care about py2app are folks doing desktop 
>development and the only folks that care about PyObjC are folks 
>doing desktop development for Mac-only applications.
>
>If that is what you want to do, then you are right, the community is 
>pretty small -- is there a larger one built around an open-source 
>dynamic language? I have no idea.

I'm not sure that there is a larger Mac community built around an 
open-source dynamic language. However, I'm trying to figure out how 
viable Python is to develop applications on the Mac. That requires at 
least py2app for packaging and PyObjC for full access to Mac native 
controls, from what I can tell. wxPython may be a viable option, but 
the 3.x support seems MIA.

>
>>Given that Python seems to position itself as a major programming 
>>and scripting language, it seems rather strange that there is so 
>>little effort placed into providing first class support for the 
>>second most popular computing platform.
>
>It does have first class support for scripting, command line stuff, 
>web app development, etc -- one reason the there are so many more 
>users of Python on the Mac than there are folks on this list is that 
>all that stuff "just works".

I suppose that is true. Maybe it is just application development 
where people want native applications for the various platforms that 
doesn't "just work". It is possible that Python will never be that. I 
have been hoping for a long time that it would be moving in that 
direction. That is the main reason for my original questions here.

Thanks,

-Rodney