Making Python 3 more attractive

Post by BrendanEich » Mon, Apr 27, 2015, 6:06 AM UTC

juliangregorian wrote: post #70

bjwbell wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox added Python support in the past and there was no uptake. Brendan Eich has a hnews comment on it. I think 2x-3x perf improvement /is/ possible. I mean we have the example of javascript that went from terrible perf to almost native parity. Of course Mozilla & Google each dedicated an entire team to get there. We already have the example of PyPy too which /today/ averages a >5x ( http://speed.pypy.org/ ) speed…

Looks like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096459 is the Brendan Eich comment.

And again, recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9188011

Post by rburhum » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 3:15 PM UTC

qznc wrote: post #142

rburhum wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly curious if there is a good argument for any of the examples you mentioned.

Scripting and Tooling becomes more robust wrt Unicode. You write a short script which works on some ASCII data. Later that ASCII suddenly becomes utf8. With Python 2 you could easily run into weird issues, when there is a unicode object instead of the expected str. With Python 3 decode is more explicit and robust. Scripting and Tooling are the major uses of Python for me, so I like Python 3.

I always work with utf-8 strings that get passed around from native C code to python. So far I have never had an issue. The argument for me for unicode support seems weak. Is there anything else beyond string encode/decode/manipulation? You mentioned tooling... like what?

Re: Making Python 3 more attractive

Re: Making Python 3 more attractive