python 3's adoption

Xah Lee xahlee at
Wed Jan 27 00:47:35 CET 2010

Some thoughts about Python 3 Adoption.

Xah Lee, 2010-01-26

Some notes of Wikipedia readings related to Python.

Unladen Swallow, a new project from Google. It is a new python
compiler with the goal of 5 times faster than the de facto standand
implementation CPython. Also note Stackless Python, which is already
been used in some major commercial projects.

Was looking into what's new in Python 3. See:
>From a quick reading, i don't really like it. Here's some highlights:

    * Print is now a function. Great, much improvement.
    * Many functions that return lists now returns “Views” or
“Iterators” Instead. A fucking fuck all fucked up shit. A extraneous
“oop engineering” complication. (See: Lambda in Python 3000)
    * The cmp() function used in sort is basically gone, users are now
supposed to use the “key” parameter instead. This is a flying-face-
fuck to computer science. This would be the most serious fuckup in
python 3. (See: Sorting in Python and Perl)
    * Integers by default is long. Great!
    * Much more integrated unicode support, rewrite of most its text
or string semantics. Fantastic. Finally.

Am looking because i wonder if i should switch to python 3 for my own
few scripts, and rewrite my Python Tutorial for version 3. Am also
interested to know how python 3 is received by the computing industry.
Apparantly, a little search on the web indicates that vast majority of
python base have not switched, as expected, for many good reasons.
Vast majority of major python modules and tools have not switched.
Most linux distro have not switched, i don't find any large
corporation having adopted Python 3 (Google, Yahoo, Facebook,
NASA,... ). (sources: Source, Source) Basically, such a incompatible
change with trivial, ideological improvements, is too costy to switch.

I wonder, if by 2015, will most large corporate users have switched to
python 3. I give it a maybe. In today's Proliferation of Computing
Languages, such a major antic by Guido can just hurt itself. What is
he thinking? He of course thought himself as a god of lang designer,
who sincerely wants to push towards perfection, all future-looking.
Unfortunately, the tens of other major language designers all think

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