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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."
They really went the Microsoft route on this one.
It looks like there's an opportunity out there - depending on how much people value their time at, or how much companies are prepared to pay to assure their code base. You never know, there may even be some value in having your Python code V3 certified?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Back in the day we had to count on MS to roll out new versions of languages that would require expensive re-writes of systems working perfectly well on the old platform.
Nice to see OSS getting into the act. Developers, developers, developers, developers...(insert monkey dance here).
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This is why I don't use languages that have a single vendor controlling the standard and tools. At least with C and C++ there are many many vendors and the standards are backwardly compatible (not counting the first C++ standard breaking all the de facto standard C++ source)
Languages like D, Haskell, Python, Perl, Lua, etc are all pretty interesting. but making them a core component of your business seems like a bad idea. The people who put them together are not getting paid by you and don't really care about your company's schedules. Generally you just have to force users of your scripts to install the right version of python/whatever until you can move all your software forward.
Hopefully you can move your source forward before RHEL and Ubuntu switch to the new tools exclusively (there will be a transition period, thankfully). But then you're still stuck having to support customers who run an older RHEL and won't upgrade.
With C I don't have to do any of this. I have other problems to worry about, but they are at least in my control.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have used a lot of languages in my time time and when I was finally dragged, kicking, screaming, biting, and gnashing my teeth into perl, I thought perl was one of the worst languages ever provided to people who went to college and got some form of "MIS" degree. Then I took a job that had a bunch of stuff written in Python and I praised perl.
Let's face it, Python is another step in the complete destruction of useful languages. Rather than force people to actually understand how things work, we now create "languages" that do everything for us. Perl and Python are not really languages. They are gigantic synonyms that insulate the user from anything remotely like what the underlying operating system or hardware is doing and it is debilitating innovation.
There is nothing that I have ever written in Perl that I could not have accomplished in C using less memory and fewer CPU cycles. The same goes for Python.
If you are interested in remaining ignorant and writing crap code in a crap grammar, great. Otherwise, who cares? Isn't Python 3.0 yet another conduit through which we can obfuscate"programming" and allow a community college 'MIS' major to claim he has the education as an MIT Computer Science graduate?