Python 3.0: What's The Point?

According to the Zen of Python (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/), and the whole idea upon which python is created: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

That right there sums up the whole point of Python 3, necessary evil (reverse incompatibility) for future good.

UNICODE support would be reason enough to answer "what's the point".

Also, some operations in Python 3, particularly those that are relevant to me as a web application developer, are as fast as 2.6 and in fact significantly faster than 2.5.x.

If for no other reason than the much better support for Unicode - an advantage that will pay off dividends across all products built on 3 in the future - that would be reason enough.

As it is when you look at third party packages that claim to support Unicode you'll frequently find all sorts of cruft that doesn't play well with other packages.

With respect to Unicode and Python, what was once less than intuitive, is now easy. It just works.

Sounds a bit like all the VB Classic guys moaning about VB.NET. I joined in a bit myself (mind .NET 1.0 was pretty bad) but now quite happily work in C#, VB.NET and VB6 - whatever makes the customer happy.

Many thousands of VB programmers (hundreds of thousands?) bridged the gap and a great many work in both versions just like me. It just is not a problem.

I wanted to like Jens' article, as a fellow Rubyist who had left a few 10klocs of Python in his wake. But I thought this was really weak. Instead of coming across like genuine tough questions, I think Jens wears his bias on his shoulder, even commenting that he's been "tipped more towards Ruby" by this "fork in the community" (a particularly funny comment from a Rubyist).

His worst argument: a comment that claims he's worried that Py3k will get security fixes that Python 2.6 won't --- a borderline-irresponsible cheap shot.

It's too bad, because I actually agree with his assessment; I get a whiff of "second-system syndrome" from this whole Py3k project, and the idea of breaking random bits of code in an interpreted, dynamically typed language and then fixing them with a code translator seems like lunacy.

As a sometimes Python core developer allow me to say stuff. The main goal was to remove mistakes; an all-at-once deprecation. The release was actually much less ambitious than the original name "Python 3000" implied. Guido read one of Joel's posts on rewriting software [the one on the Mozilla rewrite] and dictated that 3.0 be done in a year or two. See the list of PEPs [Python Enhancement Proposals] for silly big changes that were shot down.

As for python 3.0 being 10% slower than 2.5 - that means that it is is just 1.9 times faster than Ruby instead of a clean 2x? And the backwards incompatible version took just two years instead of infinity like Perl and two years instead of the UNK for Ruby? Python 2.5 benefited from a corporate sponsored "Need For Speed" sprint where twenty of the core devs went on a paid vacation with a mission to just sprint on speed issues. There hasn't been a corresponding sponsored event for 3.0.

A huge amount of volunteer time has been spent on backwards compatibility issues. When the Python 3.0 issue was first floated the Twisted and Django folks had lots of worries about the transition and supporting two versions (2.x and 3.x). Hundreds of hours were spent on the email lists and PyCon dinners hashing out the details. Thousands of hours were spent adding warnings and best practices docs to 2.6 as well as on the "2to3" translation tool.

Time will tell but there will certainly be lessons learned from the Python 3 release.

Python3 won't be standard until it's adopted as the main python of several widespread linux distros and available in a clean, batteries included way for OSX and all 36 flavours of windows.

Bitching about py3k is basically whining about being forced to learn new things.

The one question I have is are people going to start using different filename conventions?

I could see temporarily associating .py3 with a /usr/local/bin/py3k for testing purposes and porting 2.6 to 3, but I really hope it doesn't become a widespread practice.

Anyone have any insight on the comment about Python 3 being 10% slower?