New Python 3.0 string formatting - really necessary?

[Christian Heimes]

Patrick Mullen schrieb:
> 2) In my experience, major version changes tend to be slower than
> before.  When a lot of things change, especially if very low-level
> things change, as happened in python 3.0, the new code has not yet
> went through many years of revision and optimization that the old code
> has.  In my opinion, python 3 was rushed out the door a bit.  It could
> have done with a few more months of optimization and polishing.
> However, on the other hand, it is going to take so long for python
> infrastructure to convert to python 3, that an earlier release makes
> sense, even if it hasn't been excessively polished.  The biggest
> reason for the speed change is the rewritten stdio and
> unicode-everything.  Hopefully this stuff can be improved in future
> updates.  I don't think anyone WANTS cpython to be slower.

The 3.0 release targets third party developers. Authors of 3rd party
extensions and libraries need a stable API to port their software to a
new major release. The main objective was feature completeness and
stability. If you need speed either stick to the 2.x series or wait
until 3.1 is out.

We could have waited a few more months or even a few more years with a
3.0 release. There is always - I repeat ALWAYS - work to do. For an open
source project like Python "release early, release often" works better.

Christian