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Interview With Python Creator Guido Van Rossum (techrocket.com)
The online programming school Tech Rocket just published a new interview with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. "Looking back I don't think I ever really doubted Python, and I always had fun," he tells the site. "I had a lot of doubts about myself, but Python's ever-increasing success, and encouragement from people to whom I looked up (even Larry Wall!), made me forget that."
He describes what it's like being Python's Benevolent Dictator for Life, and says that the most astonishing thing he's seen built with Python is "probaby the Dropbox server. Two million lines of code and counting, and it serves hundreds of millions of users." And he leaves aspiring programmers with this advice. "Don't do something you don't enjoy just because it looks lucrative -- that's where the competition will be fiercest, and because you don't enjoy it, you'll lose out to others who are more motivated."
He describes what it's like being Python's Benevolent Dictator for Life, and says that the most astonishing thing he's seen built with Python is "probaby the Dropbox server. Two million lines of code and counting, and it serves hundreds of millions of users." And he leaves aspiring programmers with this advice. "Don't do something you don't enjoy just because it looks lucrative -- that's where the competition will be fiercest, and because you don't enjoy it, you'll lose out to others who are more motivated."
It's the "serves hundreds of millions of users" part. I know "web scale" is an overly used buzzword but it is in fact very difficult to serve huge numbers of users. There's also collaboration tools, an API for other developers to integrate Dropbox into their own software, etc.
Works as long as what you make in that language won't get too big.
Two million lines of code for DropBox is pretty impressive for a script kiddie language.
Learn how to use a compiled language like Java.
If you have a need for speed, compile Python code to C binary with Cython.
http://cython.org/
"seen built" didn't say he built it himself.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
QED. Search your feelings, Luke. You will see that Perl is the path to enlightenment.
Here's a list. Only 30 out of the top 360 packages aren't ready for Python 3.
http://py3readiness.org/
I can easily see half that change coming just from gaining access to Jinja2. I've worked extensively with a huge array of templating languages in recent years, and while they all have basically the same syntax none of them are anywhere near the sheer unadulterated power that Jinja2 offers.
It took me a while to figure out just what it was that Jinja2 had that they all lacked and which made such a massive difference. I finally nailed it down. All of them have, right in the beginning of the manual guides on how to write helper functions to extend the language. Jinja2 barely mentions that. The reason is simple: it hardly ever needs them. This is because Jinja2 exposes any data you pass to it as the original python object - with all that object's methods available inside the template.
That's extremely useful. The problem with the "helper methods" approach is that you're screwed whenever the thing running the template is not code you have access to (or can afford to alter). In a corporate environment you may be using a tool like consul-template which you really don't want to maintain a local derivative off, so you can't use any functions in your templates that their derivative of golang-template did not already include. With Jinja2 even with somebody else's code you still have access to every method the data type object exposes.
So if you have to get the overlap of two lists in your template from two disparate upstream data sources you don't have to hope the template language includes the right list operators, you just use the built-in methods of the list objects directly.
Have you seen what a list-overlap seeker written in pure golang-template looks like ? It's a hellish maze of deeply nested loops and if statements and the output enmeshed inside all that gunk because golang lacks a sufficient set method to create new variables that can let you pre-construct your new list before looping over it.
I had to do just that recently, the golang template was well over 500 lines of unreadable and barely navigatable junk - I did the same thing in less than 5 lines of Jinja2.
So I can easily imagine that for a web app that's highly template driven you could end up with a huge amount of code that exists within the templates (or as helper-functions to the template library) which you can throw away if you redo it in python.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
There's probably working, and there's actually working. When you have a complex system that a business actually depends on, running 2to3 absolutely requires that everything be re-tested. The larger the system is -- and that can mean interactions with libraries, databases, other languages, etc. -- the larger that testing job is, and it gets larger in a nonlinear fashion with the amount of code as interactions multiply.
However, Python 2.x isn't going to go anywhere. If you have a substantial system or systems written in it, and it's doing what it supposed to be doing, there's actually no reason to move it over. If you want to, you can write new stuff in 3.x; no reason they both can't exist on the same machine(s), either. Either one can call the other. Nothing to it.
Personally, so far at least, I have no specific need for 3.x, and so haven't bothered with it for anything serious, but I'm not against using it if some reason arises that makes it more useful than 2.x. I can't say I really object to 2.x becoming stable because development is going towards 3.x, either. Again, it reduces the need to re-test, and it keeps the unit testing mechanisms stable as well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.