Defending the Python lanuage...

[David Bolen]

rony.steelandt at bucodi.com (Rony) writes:

>       And this goes even further than that, another point is how good
> will it be supported ? Here i don't mean only the language it self but
> allso his librarys. Take Python as an example. The language itself is
> going trough a *normal* growing cycle and is very well supported, but
> imaging that with version Python 3000 (:)the "community" has decided
> that the Tkinter library won't be supported any more.. I can assure
> you that this would be a very expensive decission for us, our whole
> GUI library is based on that now. And isn't this a risk with many open
> source projects ?

Others have also said it, but I think it bears re-iterating.  This is
a problem with any toolset, and definitely not limited to open source.
You can rephrase this statement in terms of commercial tools and
libraries and have it be just as true.  Believing that using
commercial tools has a guarantee of longevity or support just because
it's commercial is a mistake.  Companies go out of business regularly,
products are retired or end-of-life'd (and sometimes with limited
notice), etc...

We brought up a new embedded product using a major embedded OS in late
1999.  Very shortly after we had completed the work on the product and
started using it in production, the company was bought by a competitor
(with a competing OS).  All the "nice" stuff was said about continued
support, and in fact updates - probably already in the works before
the merger - were continued for maybe a year or so but the writing was
on the wall and now the OS is discontinued.  Now, we just keep working
with the version we had for our product (as do tons of other devices
using it) but we have little access to being able to evolve it if
necessary, since it's a binary only distribution.  And this was an OS
(albeit embedded).

But if everyone associated with Python development were to disappear
tomorrow, I'd still have full source to everything, and could take
control of any evolution I needed to maintain my system.  Heck, if I
didn't have the skills internally to work on Python (as opposed to my
application using it), I could just hire people to do that.  That to
me helps ease my concern because I feel more in control.  It's also
the reason that, although I'm in the Windows environment and tend to
go with the pre-built binaries, I always make sure that if I had to, I
could rebuild from sources properly.

--
-- David
-- 
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------\
 \               David Bolen            \   E-mail: db3l at fitlinxx.com  /
  |             FitLinxx, Inc.            \  Phone: (203) 708-5192    |
 /  860 Canal Street, Stamford, CT  06902   \  Fax: (203) 316-5150     \
\-----------------------------------------------------------------------/