why isn't python more popular?

[Andrew Kuchling]

"Tim Peters" <tim_one at email.msn.com> writes:
> ... to make
> one genuinely backward-incompatible change (having str(unbounded_int) drop
> the trailing "L", a change requested by masses of users for years).  

Actually there are a few backward-incompatible changes, listed in
the 2.0 article:

	* str( <long> ) no longer appends an 'L'
	* list.append( 1,2 ) now raises a TypeError exception
	* repr( <float> ) uses a different precision from str()
	* the -X switch is gone, so the standard exceptions are always classes
	* You can now use longs for multiplying sequences and slicing them,
which might conceivably possibly stand a chance of breaking something.

> Do you think Python is in a different boat than Linux there?  Guido still
> keeps much firmer control over Python than does Linus over Linux, and while
> that may not even be a *good* thing in the end, I think it's more what IT

Actually that's not true.  Torvalds maintains the master source tree,
and every change to it comes from him applying a patch at some point.
He simply trusts patches from some people more than others, and applies those patches with less (perhaps no) checking.  

This obviously isn't too scalable; when he goes on a trip official
releases crash to a halt and people such as Alan Cox have to release
their own branches, which then need to get merged back.  I'm amazed
that there's no publicly available CVS (or other VC system) used for
the Linux source tree; the loss to the collective memory (or, "Just
why was this line added in the first place?") must be enormous.  As
the kernel grows, release cycles are getting longer and longer -- it's
been 2 years waiting for 2.4 now -- which I'm starting to see as a good
argument for using FreeBSD.  (But that's a whole other flamewar...)

--amk