Python 3 is killing Python

[Rick Johnson]

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 9:27:56 AM UTC-5, Frank Millman wrote:

> 2. Those adversely affected by the change are very vocal,
> but we hear very little from those who have benefited from
> it. This is to be expected - they are just getting on with
> developing in Python3 and have no need to get involved in
> controversies.

And those that "vote with their feet" are not vocal either.

Now, you might think: 
    
    "Why do i *I* care if people start using other languages?", 

Well, if you enjoy writing Python code, and understand (like
i do) that Python is truly valuable to the programming
community, then you should also understand that as the number
of members drop, so too does the "collective intelligence"
of the community. 

Not to mention that at some point, when the numbers get low
*enough*, maintaining a project as big as Python becomes
untenable.

Of course, no community or project can expect expansion of
members "forever", but the last thing you want is people
running away from your project. At a minimum, you want to
maintain a reasonable "average" of community members.

I personally know of few major software developers, who
whilst "shopping" for a scripting language for their API,
wanted to integrate Python because of it's clean syntax and
auto-encapsulation, but they where forced to choose *another*
language because of all the headaches that backwards
incompatibility of Python 3000 would induce in the users of
the API.