Python in the future

[Michael Hudson]

j vickroy <jvickroy at sec.noaa.gov> writes:

> I'm relatively new to Python and am trying to gain support for it at
> my work place.  To that end, I'm giving a brief (overview)
> presentation.  One of the items I have been asked to consider is
> where will Python be 5-10 years from now.  I certainly don't know
> where C++ or Java will be in that time frame!  Any ideas on where to
> research the future plans for Python would be appreciated.

Well, one of the ways I've been avoiding work in the last few weeks
hass been to read some ancient archives of this list - and one thing
that is obvious is that Python hasn't changed very much in the last
five years.  There's a quality quote from Tim Peters in the Python
quotations file:

   In many ways, it's a dull language, borrowing solid old concepts
   from many other languages & styles: boring syntax, unsurprising
   semantics, few automatic coercions, etc etc.

The point being that Python hasn't changed fast, and probably won't
change that fast in the next five years either.

What I think will/would like to happen in the next couple of years is
that the implementations of Python will get more solid and faster;
things like stackless and Neil Schemenauer's (who's name I can now
almost spell without looking it up...) gc patch may move into the
core.

I'd guess that some kind of optional static typing will be present,
which should enable Python to get significantly faster - and as that
happens, I'd expect more of Python to be written in Python (this trend
is already beginning - see the import- and compiler- sigs).

Indentation based structure is here to stay, I'd think!

But 5-10 years is an almost absurdly long time in computing.  I hope
Python is still here then! (C/C++ can go take a leap, though).

-- 
  well, take it from an old hand: the only reason it would be easier
  to program in C is that you can't easily express complex  problems
  in C, so you don't.                   -- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp