[Python-Dev] RFC: PEP 460: Add bytes % args and bytes.format(args) to Python 3.5

[Matt Billenstein]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 07:12:06PM +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote:
> Why can't someone write a third-party library that does what these projects
> need, and that works in both Py2 and Py3, so that these projects can be
> modified to use that library and thus get on with their porting to Py3?

Apologies if this is out of place and slightly OT and soap-boxey...

Does it not strike anyone here how odd it is that one would need a library to
manipulate binary data in a programming language with "batteries included" on a
binary computer?  And maybe you can do it with existing facilities in both
versions of Python, although in python3, I need to understand what bytes,
format, ascii, and surrogateescape mean - among other things.

I started in Python blissfully unaware of unicode - it was a different time for
sure, but what I knew from C worked pretty much the same in Python - I could
read some binary data out of a file, twiddle some bits, and write it back out
again without any of these complexities - life was good and granted I was
naive, but it made Python approachable for me and I enjoyed it.  I stuck with
it and learned about unicode and the complexities of encoding data and now I'm
astonished at how many professional programmers don't know the slightest bit
about it and how horribly munged some data you can consume on the web might be
- I agree it's all quite a mess.

So now I'm getting more serious about Python3 and my fear is that the
development community (python3) has fractured from the user community (python2)
in that they've built something that solves their problems (to oversimplify
lets say a webapp) - sure, a bunch of stuff got fixed along the way and we gave
the users division they would expect (3/2 == 1.5), but somewhere what I felt
was more like a hobbyist language has become big and complex and "we need to
protect our users from doing the wrong thing."

And I think everyone was well intentioned - and python3 covers most of the
bases, but working with binary data is not only a "wire-protocol programmer's"
problem.  Needing a library to wrap bytesthing.format('ascii', 'surrogateescape')
or some such thing makes python3 less approachable for those who haven't
learned that yet - which was almost all of us at some point when we started
programming.

I appreciate everyone's hard work - I'm confident the community will cross the
2-3 chasm and I hope we preserve the approachability I first came to love about
Python when I started using it for all sorts of applications.

thx

m

-- 
Matt Billenstein
matt at vazor.com
http://www.vazor.com/