Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Some, like the "field heavyweight" quoted by the OP, are refreshingly > pragmatic about it. They're quite happy to use a language that is > pretty crappy for most purposes today considered practical because it > does a great job of continuing to run the programs written to address > the "practical purposes" of three decades ago (if I interpret the "76" > in "SHELX-76" correctly).
He is one of the brightest people you'll find on this planet. His set of programs still is a de-facto standard, used to solve the vast majority of (small molecule) crystal structures. To know what that means, consider that without his work, you wouldn't be sitting in front of *that* computer. It would be a different computer in a different world. > Others, like the OP, want to freeze Python and request that updated > versions be considered an internal fork in the project rather than > evolutionary[1] progress whenever their inconvenience tolerance (which > is clearly high in the OP's case, let's not belittle that!) is > exceeded. It remains to be seen if your idea of "evolution" will still be remembered in 30 years. From all I've seen, arbitrarily introducing hardships in the name of progress doesn't work out in practice. Look around. C++ is dirty but got big because it never seriously broke with the C heritage. Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world even though the OS is dirty, but my DOS Turbo C compiler from 1990 probably still runs on a Windows XP system. Apple's market share in the OS market is still tiny in comparison, I'd argue to a significant degree because they were constantly "innovating". I'm not at all convinced Python 3 will succeed, although I'm hoping for it. Introducing a break like that without at the same time introducing new technologies is in stark violation of "practicality beats purity." My personal battle is to not see my own work die a slow death because everybody in my field thinks I must be crazy to base my work on something that is one day this and the next day something incompatible. If you give it a new name at least, it will be much easier for me to explain and stand my ground. Also, look at the sqlite experience: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-3000/2008-February/011991.html You really need to be able to have both the old and the new in the same environment indefinitely, and it has to be easily predictable what you get when you run "python". Ralf _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
