Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible

Stony Stevenson writes "Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning. The Python development community is working towards a new, backwards-incompatible version of the language, version 3.0, which is slated for release in early 2009. Anthony Baxter, the release manager for Python and a senior software engineer at Google Australia, said "We are going to break pretty much all the code. Pretty much every program will need changes." Baxter also added another tidbit for attendees, saying that Python accounts for around 15 percent of Google's code base."

Comments

#1 way to prevent adoption of new language version

[mmeister]

This looks like a shoot yourself in the foot moment. I briefly read through the Py3K stuff and found it difficult to see what the true benefits were for creating this incompatibility. If they want to do this and have folks adopt it, they need to provide a COMPELLING SET OF REASONS for why they are making it incompatible.

If you're going to make a language completely incompatible, you basically have created a NEW language.

Re:Just rename it.

[BigJClark]

Low flying 747. Completely missed the point. I'm not even going to quote Mark Twain on this one.

Re:It's a race

[jellomizer]

And what did that do to perl... Nothing good. Perl was once a really big language use for almost every app out there. Then by the time from the move to perl 6 the apps went away and more Python Apps starting appearing.