Python 3.0 unfit for serious work?

[Jay Tee]

On Feb 21, 1:41 am, "BJörn Lindqvist" <bjou... at gmail.com> wrote:

[ citing me ]

> "if 2.4 code doesn't run on 3.0, it's rather likely that strong
> pressure will be applied to port *away* from Python into something
> less capricious."
>
> Who are these people that are applying the strong pressure? How can
> you run a international and seemingly very important project without
> knowing basic things about how to handle versioning problems?

This isn't versioning.  At least not the way I see it.  Versioning has
to do with changes in your own product.  Indeed one needs to know how
to handle it.  Lately our project has been doing OK on this front, a
couple years ago was a different story.

Underlying technology is a different story.  This should be reasonably
stable.  Small changes are inevitable but even these are a major pain,
since we have dependency links like the following:

  OS release links to
  Python release which changes an
  Third-party extension module which requires
  A third party library whose
  Version needs to be upgraded but which
  Is used by some other non-python means that
  Requires the earlier version.

Or the earlier problem, an OS upgrade comes with a new python version
on which existing code breaks.

The fraction of code in our system that's written in python is
something like 10% -- it's not a big pure-python system.

Now you're talking about major changes in the underlying technology,
forcing, at some point in the future, an extensive rewrite of the
python code.  Yes, at that point, some people would make the comment
that a language which changes to that extent by major versions is not
fit for production work, and if one was going to have to rewrite, it
would be better to rewrite in a more stable language.

And finally, remember the original post I replied to said that python
3.0 was determined not to be hampered by backwards compatibility.
This is quite a bit different than what you say here ("MIGHT cause
problems"):

> language than to continue using Python 2.x because Python 3.x, when it
> is released, MIGHT cause them some problems several YEARS from now?

If backwards compatibility is not a consideration, then it would be a
miracle if there were no problems.

                            JT