Booleans, integer division, backwards compatibility; where is Python going?

[James Logajan]

Cliff Wells <logiplexsoftware at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Ah, you must have chose APL or Forth, since they're pretty much in the
> feature-lock stage.  It can't be C since they've also added the damn
> boolean. 

I am sorry, but no one is tinkering with C and releasing new versions at 
anything near the rate that Python versions are coming out. It is the high 
rate of language change that is one of the causes of my disaffection, not 
change per se. Python is over 10 years old I believe, and still the changes 
are being made at an alarming rate. I don't have all the dates, but 
consider the major releases:

1.0:     ?-?-?
...
1.4:     1996?-?-?
1.5:     1998?-?-?
1.5.2:   1999-04-13   (Final)
2.0:     2000-10-16   18 months after 1.5.2, ~2.5 years after 1.5.
2.1:     2001-04-17    6 months after 2.0
2.2:     2001-12-21    8 months after 2.1
2.3:     2002?-?-?     4 to 12 months after 2.2 if this year.
2.4...:  ?-?-?         Asymptotically approaching zero?

I exclude 1.6 because I believe it was an obligatory release. A newcomer 
will, on average, have a new version to contend with 4 to 15 months after 
their initial introduction. Veterans will need to contend with releases on 
approximately a yearly basis. I have difficulty understanding why Guido 
isn't exercising more discipline in the release schedule.

> Seriously though, if this is a big concern for you (and it might well
> be), target the 1.5.2 language spec and the chances of your code not
> working even in 2.2 are slim, so I'm not sure what would be compelling
> enough to make you abandon Python.

I tried that and that strategy _failed_. The chances of failure was 100%. 
The failure was due specifically to how (as far as I can tell) Tkinter 
handles UTF-8 sequences in Unicode aware versions of Python. So I am forced 
to put version checking into my code! That just added to my irritation. 
There are other _forward_ incompatibilities in Python, but it is the hidden 
ones that misguided programmers are writing into common libraries that make 
the proliferation of Python versions too irritating to deal with.