Paul Moore writes: > The one thing that *is* substantially worse for Python, is the > circumlocutions needed in the documentation to say how to run Python. > But that's 100% down to us not being willing to say "just type the > command python". And the reason for *that* is mostly historical, > related to the Python 3 transition
I don't think that's entirely true, and the roots are much earlier than Python 3. We had the same problem with Linux distributions (especially Red Hat) and version 1 vs. version 2. This was crucial for those of us handling multibyte languages: getting Unicode Inside, even in the non-str form of Python 2, really changed things. But Python 2.0 was a .0 release. For a lot of developers dealing with unibyte languages, 1.5.2 was the workhorse until about Python 2.2. > and what happened on Linux over the python/python2/python3 > commands, and to a lesser extent the introduction of the launcher > on Windows I don't know about Windows. It might have been possible to arrange that just "python" was the right way to do things, and have "-2" and "-3" flags for specifying compatibility. But it just wasn't possible on *nix systems because /usr/bin/python was typically used for system software. They shouldn't have done that (they should have kept in it in an OS-specific place and used full shebangs), but that's not how it went .... I think those are important things to keep in mind when comparing with a very young language like Julia (Julia didn't make *any* backward compatibility promises until 1.0 in August 2018). A lot of Python's problems occur *because* of its multi-use potential and *because* of its wide adoption in practice. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/S7H6W75N62YGW5L2WYQH53BTFDJJWRZK/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
