Python 3.0 came out this week

Posted by Greg Laden on December 6, 2008
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The much-anticipated next incarnation of the popular Python programming language — voted favorite scripting language in the 2008 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards — slithered onto the scene on Wednesday with the release of Python 3.0. Known popularly as Python 3000 or Py3k, Python 3.0 bears the distinction of being the first release in the language’s history to deliberately break compatibility with previous versions.

The Python 3.0 change everyone is talking about is without a doubt the break with backwards-compatibility…. details

Everything I’ve heard about 3.0 makes me think this was a very good idea. I know people will complain. But they’ll get over it.

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  1. #1 Alex Besogonov
    December 6, 2008

    Everything? Yeah, sure.

    Python is stagnating. P3k is really only a little better than a maintenance release.

    GIL is still present (and will be present for the foreseeable future). This makes Python interpreter effectively single-threaded, and that’s in the time when we’ll all soon have computers with 16 cores.

    Lack of a fast pickle/unpickle, light threads and messaging system kills the possibility of Erlang-like parallelism (Python Multiprocessing is a joke).

    Garbage collector is still extremely primitive.

    And so on.

    But rejoice! Several useful and working features have been removed!

  2. #2 Brian X
    December 7, 2008

    Alex:

    If you don’t like it, fork off.

    (After all, it’s not like Guido can stop you from using an older release…)

  3. #3 Vitalij Zadneprovskij
    December 9, 2008

    Brian X:
    Forking is not the only solution. It is the worst one. Many programmers who use python don’t have time or skills to improve it. I am one of them.

    Alex Bogdanov did a good thing showing defects of python. Everything ha defects. Only admitting python defects can make it better.

  4. #4 D
    December 9, 2008

    If fearless leader catches us talking like this we’ll be in big trouble.