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Guido and Bruce Eckel Discuss Python 3000
Phoe6 writes "Leading author and programmer, Bruce Eckel, posted some of his concerns on Python 3000 stating that the Python community is failing to address some of the important issues with this major, backward incompatible release. Problems he mentions are concurrency support on multi-core CPUs, easy deployment support, and a standardized user interface, amongst others. He expresses his dissatisfaction at the post titled "Python 3K or Python 2.9?. Guido van Rossum addresses the concerns in a very pragmatic way with his response to Bruce Eckel and calls for more developers to contribute to Python to improve it further. Bruce Eckel concludes with his thoughts that he wants his favorite language to be better with his reply to Guido's reply."
There's 2 sides to that, though.
While I agree, if he wants something that's fundamentally incompatible, but wants to still call it Python, that's silly.
On the other hand, they're saying 'We need more devs to work on Python' and pushing people away that -care- is exactly the opposite of that. If they want new devs, they'd better be resigned to the fact that the newcomers WILL have a different vision, just as this guy does. Finding code-slaves that will do everything you want exactly as it always has been is nearly impossible. You have to pay people to make them go through pain like that. (Coding in someone else's style is just as hard as painting in someone else's... Initially it's almost impossibly hard, and it gets easier with time... And there's always the alternative of working on something else without all that pain.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
A lot of what Eckel is saying is basically "Python should be more like other languages" - not because they're better, but because I'm more used to them. Obviously that's totally ridiculous, yet not surprising: If you look at his resume, it seems he's far more familiar with other languages than Python. I seriously doubt his credential - let alone objectiveness - to question Python's design.
Good point! Managing developers is hard enough in a company where the devs are paid. Managing volunteers is much, much harder. I strongly believe that half of the success of many open source projects is not the brilliant ideas or the super cool code, but the personality of the lead developer. Linus and Guido have proven to be such personalities that managed to galvanize hoards of developers around them. That is quite impressive. How many managers out there would be able retain employees without any pay?
One distinctive feature of these open source project leaders is that they have to act like assholes sometimes. I proves that they are tough, have a vision and won't budge. At first it seems counter-intuitive that being disagreeable will accomplish more but it works because even if it pushes one developer way, it might attract others or make the ones who are left work harder. It's like a medieval army. Decimating 1% of the army is worth it because it will make the other %99 percent work harder.
Guido is right that Bruce's comments are mostly not core language issues.
But that's also the problem the Python language is fine the way it is; it doesn't need any major overhaul. Before hacking away on P3K, Guido should concentrate on getting things like the UI, the standard libraries, and package management straightened out. Community contributions won't fix those; in fact, community contributions are the source of many of the problems of Python because often, there are multiple, mutually incompatible libraries and tools trying to do the same thing and stepping on each other.
Guido is doing what is fun (hacking the language) instead of what is needed (straightening out the libraries), and that's not the best choice for Python overall.
Probably because the syntactic whitespace "problem" only exists in the heads of people who have never used Python.
Actually, those aren't the real problems with Python. They're not the ones that keep it from, say, replacing Perl.
Multicore support is a nonissue. CPython is too slow to need it. It's helpful to distinguish between the Python language, which isn't bad, and the CPython implementation, which is a slow, naive intepreter. CPython is about 60x slower than C. Compare Java, which, with modern just-in-time compilers, is about 2-3x slower than C. What's needed is a Python compiler with some smarts. There's Shed Skin, but it doesn't work yet.
One side effect of the speed problem is a tendency to try to write C modules to do things that take significant time. Unfortunately, CPython's interface to C is terrible, bug-prone, and changes with each new release.
The "dynamic language" thing is overdone. CPython is a demonstration of the fact that if you make everything a dictionary, it's easy to implement a dynamic language. It's also a demonstration of "if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Too much time is wasted in Python checking to see if something changed that probably didn't change. You can add or change functions or data of a running object or a running function. From outside the object or functionor thread, even! It's cool! It's l33t! It means you can't have an optimizing compiler. (Well, maybe you could, with one that goes to immense lengths to detect when "something funny" is going on and reworks the code on the fly. Won't be easy to implement.) Those features just don't get used that much, except to patch around bugs in the buggy Python libraries. The troubles with the "global interpreter lock" stem from this problem. The "global interpreter lock" is mostly protecting all those dictionaries which define the program. After all, one thread might want to patch the code in another thread.
Years ago, LISP hackers used to talk about how great it was that LISP programs could modify themselves while they were running. Few useful programs ever actually did so. Java has a certain amount of dynamism; you can, if you really have to, create Java code from within a program, compile it, and load it. Few programs need more dynamism than that. The Shed Skin implementation imposes some restrictions on dynamism, and they're on the right track.
Libraries are someone else's problem. Python is better than Perl as a language, but CPAN is better than Python's Cheese Shop. Many key modules aren't part of the main Python distribution and aren't synchronized with it. Examples are the interfaces to databases like MySQL and the interface to SSL. These lag months or years behind the base system. Modules outside the small "core" are not supported in any coherent way. Each is supported by a developer or two, working in isolation. If they lose interest, the module languishes, and nobody else can change it. This sometimes leads to multiple libraries for the same purpose, each with different bugs, and none good enough to obsolete the others.
The overall effect is that if you try to write something complicated in Python, everything goes along just great until you hit some library bug that can't easily be fixed. Or you discover that you need racks of servers to compensate for the painfully slow implementation.
That's why Python hasn't even replaced Perl, over fifteen years into the deployment of Python.
He said that 'self == whitespace indentation' whereas for me I see that as exactly the oposite:
- using whitespace for indention remove 'visual noise' at the cost of 'language magic'
- using self adds 'visual noise' with the (dubious IMHO) benefit of language 'simplicity'.
IMHO removing self would be a big plus for Python, sure self makes things more explicit but if developers really wanted to use explicit language, they would stay with C instead of using Python, Ruby..
Interesting. Where other languages have print statements that do exactly what you tell them, Python's print statement has at least two ways of adding unexpected characters. Not what I'd call "dumb simplicity".
While most experienced programmers can predict what a print statement will output, they won't be able to do this with Python's
print "Hello, World!" # One extra character is added here.
print "Hello", "world" # Two extra characters are added here.
print "Hello", # Guess how many extra characters are added here? Hint: not zero.
Quiz:
* How can you use Python's print statement to print some text without a newline? No fair firing up the interpreter!
* Name three languages whose print statement only prints characters that the programmer explicitly passes to it.
I always mod up spelling trolls.