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Python 3 can revive Python

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Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#181

Post by thinkpad20 »

eloisant wrote: post #143
icebraining wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python was created by a non-native English speaker.

Well, he's Dutch, his language uses an alphabet meaning that even with all the accents it's still a one byte language. Having to work with 2 bytes languages (CJK typically) without proper Unicode support is much more of a hassle.

This makes me wonder about Ruby, whose creator is Japanese and Japanese is certainly not a language whose characters can be expressed in a single byte. Is Ruby better than Python for complex encodings? If so has it always been this way, or did Matz just deal with it in the early days?

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#182

Post by Aardshaark »

shadowmint wrote: post #152
rdtsc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm always skeptical to hear that a developer has moved from X programming language to Go. I see what you mean. Also, presumably those that didn't switch, that use and love Python, are not very compelled to write a "We are still staying with Python" blog. And I think they should. Marketing and perception is important.

Spot on. Id love to see a bunch of 'I swapped to python 3 and it was amazing because... [reason]' posts. If nothing else It'd illustrate clearly either the python 3 folks haven't got a leg to stand on (unable to come up with any tangible real life [reason]) or that there are actually compelling reasons to swap over to python 3; in which case we can point people to those posts in threads like this. (personally I foray…

Here's a small reason I found when refactoring some code today:

http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3102/

Like I said, it's a small reason, but it would have made my life much easier today. Enough small reasons add up.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#183

Post by octopus »

illumen wrote: post #173
sergiosgc wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is also the modern sysadmin's Perl. This is a huge niche, to the point of not being a niche at all. Just take a look at the number of system tools used in a Redhat install that use python. Coincidentally, Redhat's python tools are one of the major reasons for continuing support of Python 2.

The next RHEL is going python 3 though I think? Fedora has done nicely over the last couple of years packaging everything for python 3 as well. A dozen or so packages left to do, but they are going well. Ubuntu, Debian, and Gnome have also been pushing to get to a python 3 use by the base system in the last releases... and are almost there as well. This of course has meant a lot more packages have been ported upstrea…

No major Linux distribution uses Python 3 as the default Python today. All of them use Python 2. Yes, they have a half backed Python 3 alternative for "almost" all packages ... We can discuss more in 4 years when the next Ubuntu LTS will be released.

Apple has no interest to migrate their Python configuration scripts to Python 3. I use Python 3 for my side projects, so I compile it myself or install it with Brew on OS X, but I suspect most users will use what comes with the OS (which is 2.7.x). One can hope ...

In conclusion, on the Linux land we'll see in about 4 years, for OS X ... maybe this summer or sometime in the future. In any case, I see no massive Python 3 adoption in the near future.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#184

Post by coldtea »

sergiosgc wrote: post #180
oshepherd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who call Go a systems programming language are fundamentally misguided. It is an applications programming language under any reasonable definition.

You know that "the people who call Go a systems programming language" are its authors, do you not?

You know that they retracted that line from the Go introduction text on the webpage, don't you?

And of course, them being Go's authors and them being wrong on characterizing it, is in no way contradictory.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#185

Post by haberman »

sergiosgc wrote: post #180
oshepherd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who call Go a systems programming language are fundamentally misguided. It is an applications programming language under any reasonable definition.

You know that "the people who call Go a systems programming language" are its authors, do you not?

Yes, but they are also the ones being surprised that Go is cannibalizing Python, not C or C++.

They are smart guys, so I can only conclude that "systems programming" means something different to them than it does to many other systems programmers.

To me, "no imposed GC" is a non-negotiable element of being a systems programming language. So I am far more drawn to Rust than Go.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#186

Post by Shorel »

skriticos2 wrote: post #118
neumann wrote: post #76

My perspective is as a researcher in academia. From here Python is far from needing to be revived, it is gaining ground. Also, Python 2 is still king and I suspect will remain popular - researchers rarely have the luxury/incentive to go back and improve it to comply with a language update. A few reasons Python is gaining ground in academia. Firstly, Python is _great_ for teaching undergraduate programming (see [0] fo…

I add that Python is excellent at data representation and transformation. You can easily write some test data and just include it in python, then transform it any way you feel you like to get intelligence out of it. With the standard library you can easily load a CSV file you exported form a data-set and then aggregate and evaluate it with only a few lines of code without much language overhead. Schema-less mixed con…

I think D will grow in that server space.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#187

Post by lmm »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #181
eloisant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he's Dutch, his language uses an alphabet meaning that even with all the accents it's still a one byte language. Having to work with 2 bytes languages (CJK typically) without proper Unicode support is much more of a hassle.

This makes me wonder about Ruby, whose creator is Japanese and Japanese is certainly not a language whose characters can be expressed in a single byte. Is Ruby better than Python for complex encodings? If so has it always been this way, or did Matz just deal with it in the early days?

Yes, Ruby has long had decent (i.e. comparable to Python 3) encoding support. But in the early days not much was made of this, perhaps because Rails was the driving force behind Ruby adoption in the west and Rails' encoding support was much worse than what Ruby could do.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#188

Post by yid »

skriticos2 wrote: post #118
neumann wrote: post #76

My perspective is as a researcher in academia. From here Python is far from needing to be revived, it is gaining ground. Also, Python 2 is still king and I suspect will remain popular - researchers rarely have the luxury/incentive to go back and improve it to comply with a language update. A few reasons Python is gaining ground in academia. Firstly, Python is _great_ for teaching undergraduate programming (see [0] fo…

I add that Python is excellent at data representation and transformation. You can easily write some test data and just include it in python, then transform it any way you feel you like to get intelligence out of it. With the standard library you can easily load a CSV file you exported form a data-set and then aggregate and evaluate it with only a few lines of code without much language overhead. Schema-less mixed con…

> I add that Python is excellent at data representation and transformation

Indeed! It's a very practical extraction and reporting language.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#189

Post by clebio »

sergiosgc wrote: post #154
eloisant wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: is the Python community OK with it becoming a niche language for scientific computing, or do we want to to keep being used as a general purpose language?

Python is also the modern sysadmin's Perl. This is a huge niche, to the point of not being a niche at all. Just take a look at the number of system tools used in a Redhat install that use python. Coincidentally, Redhat's python tools are one of the major reasons for continuing support of Python 2.

Also, Ansible: https://github.com/ansible/ansible

edit: markdown... oh, nevermind.

Re: Python 3 can revive Python

#190

Post by sergiosgc »

coldtea wrote: post #184
sergiosgc wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that "the people who call Go a systems programming language" are its authors, do you not?

You know that they retracted that line from the Go introduction text on the webpage, don't you? And of course, them being Go's authors and them being wrong on characterizing it, is in no way contradictory.

http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_project

« No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously.

(...)

We believe it's worth trying again with a new language, a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation. Regarding the points above [cut on edit]:

* It is possible to compile a large Go program in a few seconds on a single computer.

* Go provides a model for software construction that makes dependency analysis easy and avoids much of the overhead of C-style include files and libraries.

* Go's type system has no hierarchy, so no time is spent defining the relationships between types. Also, although Go has static types the language attempts to make types feel lighter weight than in typical OO languages.

* Go is fully garbage-collected and provides fundamental support for concurrent execution and communication.

* By its design, Go proposes an approach for the construction of system software on multicore machines. »

It is still at the forefront of the language presentation.

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