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Python 3 can revive Python

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Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#3
Python 3 isn't really good. It's not really bad, either. There's really not that many magic bullets (other than proper functional programming, maybe, which isn't about to happen in Python).

People are leaving Python for Go because people have always left Python for fast compiled languages. Google ditched Python for C++ and Java. Java! I've seen a lot of projects get re-written in Java from Python, but no-one worried then.

Python 3 adds some cool stuff (async, in particular), and fixes some warts. It's a bit rude of them to force people to upgrade, but that will eventually pay off. It will add more things in the future.

The people who start new projects in Python 3 will have some short-term pain, as some libraries take time to port. There will be a long term benefit, though - future libraries will be better for Python 3, and they won't have to port their project.

The only controversial thing was the use of unicode. IMO, Python 3 made the right choice - you should make everything unicode where-ever it's feasible, because it's just a mess otherwise.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#4
> It’s not like anyone is using Python 3 anyway, so take some chances. Break things.

Well, people start using it now. I'm teaching Python classes exclusively in Python 3, and do all my personal projects in Python 3 and love it.

I would like to finally have a "stable" Python 3 with forward compatibility. This is important for the future of the language, else no-one would invest in it.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#5
The idea that people move from Python specifically to Go is one of those chestnuts of conventional wisdom that never receives any kind of backing in actual data.

If you think that Python and Go are made for the same tasks then you're really confused.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#8
One pain point I've really felt recently with Python is in the deploy step. pip installing dependencies with a requirements.txt file seems to be the recommended way, but it's far from easy. Many dependencies (such as PyTables) don't install their own dependencies automatically, so you are left with a fragile one-by-one process for getting library code in place.

It was all fine once I got it worked out but it would so much nicer to provide a requirements.txt file and have pip figure out the ordering and dependency stuff. That and being able to install binary packages in a simple way from pip would make me much happier with python (no more waiting 10 minutes for numpy or whatever to compile).

As far as actual language features go however, I still find python a joy to work in.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#9
> Newer programmers are not that impressed with either version of Python.

Any evidence? If it's personal experience, then mine is exactly the opposite.

I don't know if such a thing exists, but maybe a big list of the main changes would help convince people more (type annotations, yield from, the forthcoming @ operator). From what I've seen and read, of course all this is somewhere in the docs and release notes, but I've never seen a clean concise list of the main new features, fixes and reasons why these features are cool.

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