Comment by samdk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samdk | Hacker News Reader

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As other commenters have said, he meant the book was a commercial disaster. However, that's probably at least in part because Python 3 adoption has been really, really slow in general, in large part because it's backwards-incompatible and a lot of the big existing libraries still haven't been ported yet.

One of the biggest offenders is scipy, Python's very good and very widely used statistical computing library. The soon-to-be-released scipy 0.9.0 does support Python 3 [0], but Python 3 was released in 2008, so it's taken quite a while.

Another big problem has been with web applications. Python has WSGI, a standard interface for implementing webapps that allows you to use a lot of different frameworks with a lot of different servers. (Similarly to Ruby's Rack and Java's servelets.) However, the WSGI standard for Python 3 (which has to be changed because the existing specification has encoding-related issues in Python 3) has only just been finalized as PEP 3333 [1].

[0] http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/roadmap#python-3 [1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3333/

This is essentially everything I would have said on the subject. Python 3 is technically very good, but no one is using it, hence no commercial interest in the book. The optimist would say it was just ahead of its time. The pessimist would say Python 3 is a dead end and I backed the wrong horse. I'd say the jury is still out.

When you say a book "earned out", what exactly does that mean, to someone like me who has no clue about writing books and/or publishing deals?

He discusses "earning out" on a recent post from his blog[1]:

> The book went on sale in mid-August and earned out almost immediately. “Earning out” is a publishing term which means that the book has sold enough copies that my cut of the profits has paid back the advance payments that O’Reilly gave me during the writing process. Which means that I’m already receiving royalty checks for real money.

[1]: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2011/01/09/dive-into-2010

It means a book broke even with the advance given to an author, so they can start receiving royalties.

I think we'll get there eventually.

Please, do not call people writing fine free software libraries "offenders". The "offenders" are the one who decided it was fine to phase out a more than 15 years old language without any respect for its user base. From a (professional) developer point of view, Python 3 is a new language and is treated as such. I don't think Python would have seen such adoption if developers were told up-front they would have to "migrate" all their code in ten years.

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