Using Python 2

[Rick Johnson]

Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> Rick Johnson wrote:
> > Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
> > >
> > > The risk to Python will be whether the occasion is
> > > exploited by fanboys of competing programming languages.
> > > The migration from Python 2 might be to something else
> > > than Python 3 in some circles.
> > 
> > That has been my observation as well.
> 
> It certainly has been. I still remember your panicked, "the
> sky is falling" posts terrified that unless we re-defined
> Python to your specifications, the entire Python community
> would rush to Ruby.  

You exaggerate. I do remember waging a "PyWarts" campaign
some years back, but those posts were an appeal to remedy
_real_ problems i discovered in a few specific stdlib
modules, namely: IDLE, Tkinter, re, os.path, zipfile,
tarfile, and possibly others i have since forgotten about...

> That was, oh, ten or twelve years ago, if I remember
> correctly. How did that prediction work out for you?

Well, i would say that when i first arrived on the "python
scene" (roughy about the time Python3 was released, possibly
a year or two before), the community was (thanks to the
maturity and stability of Python2) far more cohesive and
vibrant. Since then, we have been hemorrhaging python
loyalist and the core devs have become evermore isolated
from the broader community, even clannish. If you remember,
that was back in the naive days when the TIOBE index was all
the rage.

Heck, when is the last time GvR participated in any
discussion outside the hermetic bubble of Python-Dev or
Python-Ideas? Certainly he has not bothered to participate
in any fashion on this open forum, and perhaps, many of the
posts here are not worthy of his time, but some certainly
are. Such behavior leads many of us to believe that we are
second class citizens.

OTOH, in one of the few occasions that i participated in the
Ruby forums, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto responded positively
to one of my posts (which i believe, but i may have
misremembered, was an appeal for consistency of function
call syntax, as Ruby allowed the parenthesis to be omitted
when no arguments were passed, naturally, i prefered
consistency, and Matz agreed. And the fact that he took the
time to respond to a lurker proved that he is a man of the
people, which sadly, is not the case for "our dear leader".