Will python 3 ever gain critical adoption?

http://entitycrisis.blogspot.com/2009/11/python-3-is-it-doomed.html

by clutchski • 17 years ago

11 14 17 years ago

entitycrisis.blogspot.com

teilo2• 17 years ago

This topic has been beaten to death by impatient people who have no recollection or knowledge of the history of language adoption.

sophacles• 17 years ago

Further, people like GVR say things like "In a decade we figure python 3 will be pretty widespread", and "Python 3 isn't really ready for primetime yet, don't use it". Is it really a groundbreaking blog post to mention that people aren't using it now, and that it doesn't work quite the way author expected.

Of course the original author also claimed Python 3 is attempting to maintain some backwards compatibility based on a module which interfaces a system call. And then complains that it should just be a clean break from the past. And after that complains that the new thing isnt the old thing. If that confuses you, don't worry I'm confused too.

kwantam• 17 years ago

Right. Anyway, we first have to settle the question "will LISP ever get critical adoption?"

(I love LISP. I'm trying to point out that "critical adoption" doesn't seem to be a very important or measurable thing.)

adamc• 17 years ago

The folks in comp.lang.lisp seem critical enough to me.

fnid• 17 years ago

Do you have any resources for learning about such history? I'd be quite an interesting read I think.

teilo2• 17 years ago

In this case I am my own resource, having been a programmer for some 25 years, and observed the slow, but steady adoption of many languages.

The wishlist for 3.0, PEP 3100, was created in August, 2004. PEP 3000 was created on April 5, 2006, and marked the beginning of the development process. A year and a half later, 3.0 was released, and it hasn't even been a year since.

smanek• 17 years ago

I think Python 3 suffers from attempting to be compatible with Python 2. It should have been a clean break with major repairs and reconstruction, as the original Python 3000 was intended to be. Hang the expense, let's make this language _right_, and Python 2 be damned.

That worked really well for Perl 6 ;-)

SwellJoe4• 17 years ago

I think I detect a hint of sarcasm.

We don't actually know about Perl 6 yet. It's still got a few more months before it's feature complete enough for use in any general case (and performance will probably take another year or two after that to come up to snuff).

But, I strongly suspect that both Perl 6 and Python 3 will be blips on the radar of language history (even while I expect to write quite a bit of code in both before then), as JavaScript will take the place of both for a large class of problems. But it'll be seven to ten years before that shift becomes apparent.

DenisM• 17 years ago

For that to happen we would have to have all the rich libraries and interops for javascript. Who could do such a thing?

chromatic2• 17 years ago

> JavaScript will take the place of both for a large class of problems. But it'll be seven to ten years before that shift becomes apparent.

I'd believe that more if ECMAScript 4 hadn't fallen apart. I'm familiar with the PHP argument that design quality in a language doesn't necessarily harm adoption, but you do need some sort of extensibility to program more than a couple of thousand lines of code.

Will python 3 ever gain critical adoption?

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