Real Problems with Python

[Fredrik Lundh]

Tim Peters <tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:
> > ...
> >    o Christian Tismer's Stackless Python patch enables the use of
> >      first-class continuations in regular Python code. This lets
> >      people easily and in pure Python create and experiment with all
> >      sorts of funky control structures, like coroutines, generators,
> >      and nondeterministic evaluation.
> >
> >    Prognosis:
> >
> >    Pretty good, if Stackless Python makes it in, along with list
> >    comprehensions. (Personally, I suspect that this is the single most
> >    important improvement possible to Python, since it opens up a
> >    whole new category of expressiveness to the language.)
>
> Don't tell him I said this, but that's exactly why Guido fears it (any
stuff
> he may say about destabilizing the core interpreter loop is a smoke screen
> <0.5 wink>):  one programmer's "expressiveness" is often another's
> "gibberish".  Christian needs to find a "killer app" for Stackless.
Perhaps
> the Palm Pilot port is it.  Perhaps some form of migrating computations
> among machines is it.

I can name two right away: high-performance web servers
and user interface toolkits.  but I fear that nobody's going
to spend much time developing that stuff if they aren't
assured that (at least portions) of stackless python goes
into the core CPython distribution...

(on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two
proof-of-concept killer applications could out there when
it's time to start thinking about what to put into 1.7...).

</F>