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Python 2.6 to Smooth the Way for 3.0, Coming Next Month
darthcamaro writes "Some programming languages just move on to major version numbers, leaving older legacy versions (and users) behind, but that's not the plan for Python. Python 2.6 has the key goal of trying to ensure compatibility between Python 2.x and Python 3.0, which is due out in a month's time. From the article: 'Once you have your code running on 2.6, you can start getting ready for 3.0 in a number of ways,' Guido Van Rossum said. 'In particular, you can turn on "Py3k warnings," which will warn you about obsolete usage patterns for which alternatives already exist in 2.6. You can then change your code to use the modern alternative, and this will make you more ready for 3.0.'"
These kind of compatibility switches are make-or-break. I'm glad there's Python 2.6 to try to ease the problem, but Py3k means that everybody who publishes python software will all of a sudden have to maintain 2 branches, for Python 2.X line and Python 3.X line.
This isn't the same as one software package having "legacy" and "bleeding edge" branches, because that's their own choice. In this case the underlying language is forcing them to choose.
Honestly, I'm not confident in the economics of such transitions, and believe Py3k will die out.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
These changes are NOT earth-shattering. 2.6 is mostly just going to add a few new features, most important being the with statement. Most code written using Python idioms will be fine under 2.6 and 3.0. Now, if you tried to write Java-esque or C-esque code under Python, you might run into issues. Even then, I doubt it. They've been deprecating features for awhile, and 3.0 is probably the point at which they'll be yanked...you've only had a year or two of DeprecationWarnings.
I'm not sure why people whine about a language evolving. Retain backwards compatibility to a fault and you end up with C++, which is crippled by C-isms. You either know your code well enough that you could make the small incremental changes along the way, or you simply don't upgrade.
Python most needs sane standard libraries. It is far too much of a "let's throw this in there" with three different naming conventions and no package organization. It is a shame, because the language itself is pretty powerful in the right hands.
You can keep your code compatible with both at the same time. Deprecated features are trivial to rewrite in most cases. There are even tools for this.
3.0rc1 (beta) is already available and has been for some time now. The advantage of 2.6 is not as much its backward-compatibility but its ability to tell you exactly what needs to change (via runtime warnings) for 3.0 without actually breaking your code. I've been using both for months now, so this article isn't exactly hot news.