[Python-ideas] from __past__ import division, str, etc

[Alejandro López Correa]

2014/1/9 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 10:34 AM, Alejandro López Correa <alc at spika.net> wrote:
>> 2014/1/8 Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info>:
>
> But what IS a good metric? How are you going to measure any of that?
> It's better to at least use PyPI stats than to pull numbers out of a
> hat.
>

The problem I see is that metric might be equal or worse than just
guessing because it is clearly biased: it focuses on open source
projects hosted on PyPI. It is easy to measure it, but maybe it is not
good to do so if that measure is used to make important decisions. In
my [very limited] experience, the number of open source projects pales
in comparison to that of projects kept "in the shadows".

> Maybe. But how much temptation would it need to be to induce a
> complete rewrite? (Mind you, it's not always a *complete* rewrite.
> I've been "porting" code from Win32 C++ to GTK Pike, and in the
> process usually shortened it by 50% or better, but mostly what I'm
> doing is reading the old code, taking maybe a few bits of it that are
> so simple they'd be the same in nearly any language, and
> reimplementing the original logic.) The expanded gap between Python
> 2.7 and Python 3.7 is mainly going to be features of 3.7 that you
> could choose to use now that you've ported, rather than mandatory
> changes. Python doesn't arbitrarily drop features or break stuff in
> minor releases. That means the gap between 2.7 and 3.7 will still be
> far FAR narrower than the gap between Python and Ruby - so,
> correspondingly, the temptation to switch to Ruby would have to be
> really strong. In the porting case I mentioned a moment ago, there
> really was a very strong temptation (using Win32 APIs meant I was
> bound to Windows (though Wine is a wonderful thing), and the C++ code
> was going through stupid levels of overhead to manage memory and
> such), so it was worth switching. I was NOT able to convince my boss
> to switch our web site from PHP into Python, because he just couldn't
> see enough benefit from changing language - but moving to a new PHP
> was a much lower hump to get over. (Only a few things needed
> changing.)

Fair enough. I think it is a good argument.

Alejandro