Wed, 04 Jul 2007

Python 3000

About three years ago, I announced my plan to move away from Python for future development work. I returned to that theme twelve months ago in a couple of posts about recent experiences with Python.

It seems time to update things now. I have just been reading Guido van Rossum’s Python 3000 Status Update in an attempt to understand what the future holds for Python.

Clearly, the Python people have decided to make major changes to Python, such that software written for Python-2.x will need work if it’s to be expected to run on Python-3. Equally clearly, a great deal of work has gone into creating mechanisms to assist programmers with the necessary translations when the time comes and that’s something I applaud.

However, I have long been unhappy with Python’s continual introduction of what I see as gratuitous changes and have been looking at alternatives. Now seems like the time to jump ship. My plan now is to do some serious testing with alternative languages so that—when the time comes for me to write some new thing—I will be ready to do it in some non-Python language.

This post is just to mark the point where that decision was finally made and to link to the Python 3000 paper that marked the tipping point.

Posted at: 17:02

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