Python 3.6 Released (python.org)

On Friday, more than a year after Python 3.5, core developers Elvis Pranskevichus and Yury Selivanov announced the release of version 3.6. An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld describes the changes as async in more places, speed and memory usage improvements, and pluggable support for JITs, tracers, and debuggers. "Python 3.6 also provides support for DTrace and SystemTap, brings a secrets module to the standard library [to generate authentication tokens], introduces new string and number formats, and adds type annotations for variables. It also gives us easier methods to customize the creation of subclasses."
You can read Slashdot's interview with Python creator Guido van Rossum from 2013. I also remember an interview this July where Perl creator Larry Wall called Python "a pretty okay first language, with a tendency towards style enforcement, monoculture, and group-think...more interested in giving you one adequate way to do something than it is in giving you a workshop that you, the programmer, get to choose the best tool from." Anyone want to share their thoughts today about the future of Python?

Comments

Larry is a cunning linguist

[bill_mcgonigle]

Perl is great for people who tend to be more "verbal". The total math geeks I know really prefer python, though.

It's wonderful that we have such a joyful abundance of tools to choose from in the FLOSS world, and aren't stuck running VB.net or whatever the craptastic commercial product is these days. Be maximally productive and we can all be happy for that.

Now let's work on getting these things coordinated so I can use a python module in perl6 and the ruby folks can use a perl6 module on rails. That was one of the great dreams of the perl6 project and it doesn't seem to be effective yet.

Re: Have they added curly braces yet?

[mark-t]

Indentation improves readability. but the problem with using it to directly delimit logical blocks is that humans don't actually directly read whitespace, there can be something syntactically wrong with a program that is not visible to humans reading it because of a line that had a tab character in it instead of spaces, or vice versa, for example. While you can always convert tabs to spaces or vice versa in certain editors, this constrains what editing environments one should develop in, and ideally, languages should be designed to be agnostic to what features should necessarily exist in the editing environment that the programmer chooses.

And related to this, doing python development, I cannot count the number of times I have accidentally had the wrong number of spaces on a line following an indented block, and at best the python environment complains about indentation levels right away, and at worst the mistake is not realized until I find that the program is not behaving as I intended it to behave.

And while I do maintain that practical programming language should not depend on the features of the editing environment to be practical, at least it is *FEASIBLE* for an editing environment to enforce strict indentation policies when the programmer has explicitly specified where each logical block begins and ends, so the claimed advantage that python has of having whitespace be significant to the syntax of the program somehow actually improving legibility is not that important in the long run, since source code that uses explicit delimiters on blocks can easily be run through a pretty-print filter, so python mandates that programmers do something for themselves that a computer is far more capable of doing reliably and consistently. Even at best this is a waste of a programmer's time.

While the intent behind it was laudable, in practice it's just not a very good idea in a modern language. It kinda reminds me of COBOL, to be perfectly honest.

Python: better than JS, except for JSON

[scorp1us]

Python 3.5 got async, await key words and has had proper OOP for a decade, things JS is still trying to get into the language. The one downfall of python is JSON object literals aren't as easy as in JS.

If more node devs found out about Python's Tornado, they'd probably pick Tornado.