06 December 2008
If only we could re-use stop-energy...
I confess: I'm a whiner, a moaner, a reactionary bitch. I like to pundit and joke about new things, it's actually much easier than making new things, isn't it... You can just wait there and shoot from the hip, it'll make you feel all righteous and smart, and it's free!
Italians are champions at moaning.
Fat lot of good it does to our GDP.
You probably already know that Python 3.0 was released a couple of days ago. After the first 24 hours of joy, the inevitable wave of stop-energy hit the crap-blogo-sphere, mostly in the form of classic concern-trolling or uninformed criticism. Now, this is inevitable; for every big action (and releasing Py3k was a huge step) produces a reaction.
The transition to Python 3 was announced eight years ago, discussed in detail for ages and eventually implemented in the last two years. Dedicated tools helping the porting effort have been developed and work pretty well, certainly better than most VB6-to-.NET wizards released by Microsoft around 2001. The old codeline will be maintained and updated for well over a year from now, with at least another major release planned, so there's no hurry to upgrade, no pressure whatsoever. Documentation of the changes is pretty exhaustive. Major third-party apps and libs have been ported already or are in the process of being ported.
So, what's left to moan about? Breaking backward compatibility. The very first thing that was announced 8 years ago, and since discussed in the most excruciating details, to the point where the "major changes" seem almost banal.
"Yeah, we got great Unicode support and the with statement, but so what? print is now a function! That's it, I'm switching to Ruby!"
"Wait, did you ever actually use Python? Do you know how much painful it was to work with Unicode? Or all that crap about new-style and old-style classes?"
"Well, I don't really know the language much..."
Stop-energy is for losers and trolls. Ignore the bitching, Python 3 will rock.
(now, if only I can manage to compile the flipping thing...)
Labels: GeekDiary, python, rants
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3 Comments:
At 6/12/08 21:53,
gpiancastelli said…
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 6/12/08 21:54,
gpiancastelli said…
If you have not yet read it, James Bennett's take on Python 3.0 could be worth a look, at least for the monkey/cage/banana/firehose story at the beginning. ;-)
At 8/12/08 15:14,
GiacomoL said…
Yeah, I got that and a few others. Which is why I wrote this: Python people (like Bennett) are seriously excited about this, whereas concern-trolls and people who don't really use Python are relaying the usual wave of stop-energy.
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