New Python 3.0 string formatting - really necessary?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:58:06 -0800, walterbyrd wrote:

> On Dec 21, 12:28 pm, Bruno Desthuilliers
> <bdesth.quelquech... at free.quelquepart.fr> wrote:
>> Strange enough,
>> no one seems to complain about PHP or Ruby's performances...
> 
> A few years back, there was a certain amount of chest thumping, when
> python/django easily beat ror in a benchmark test. Now that ruby is
> faster, I guess speed is no big issue.

Who was doing this chest-thumping? Fanboys like "r"? Why should you tar 
all of us with their immaturity?


> By the same reasoning, python advocates used to sneer at php because php
> constantly broke backward compatibility. Now that python does it,
> breaking backward compatibility is no big deal.

No, breaking backward compatibility IS a big deal. That's why Python is 
doing it slowly and carefully: the minimum amount of breakage necessary, 
and with the Python 2.x series kept going in parallel for at least two 
additional versions.

> I guess unicode support
> was not that important, until python caught up to perl.

Python has had unicode support for a long time. You just needed to write 
u'' instead of ''.


> I guess, the way it works is: you first assume that python is superior,
> then you figure out why.

Just keep on trollin'.



-- 
Steven