Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible

Stony Stevenson writes "Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning. The Python development community is working towards a new, backwards-incompatible version of the language, version 3.0, which is slated for release in early 2009. Anthony Baxter, the release manager for Python and a senior software engineer at Google Australia, said "We are going to break pretty much all the code. Pretty much every program will need changes." Baxter also added another tidbit for attendees, saying that Python accounts for around 15 percent of Google's code base."

Workaround...

[fahrbot-bot]

I think I have a Perl script that'll fix this...

Just kidding Python fanbois :-)
Chill, it's Friday.

Re:Just rename it.

[Neil Hodges]

There are already other [wikipedia.org] languages [wikipedia.org] doing this. If you think naming closely-related languages the same thing is a kludge, what do you think of naming mostly-unrelated languages the same thing?

Python is doomed

[Arthur B.]

Look at C++, they broke backwards compatibility with C ( malloc casting for example ) and because of that it never became mainstream.

Re:Whiners

[Sciros]

What color?

Re:Another Shock Story

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

No, but that means that everyone planning to run non-Python3 code will have to maintain two parallel Python installations. With package management that's not so bad, but it still puts a bit of pain on distro maintainers.

This is already done in the distros I've seen.

It does have block statements.

[Virak]

They're just delimited with indentation instead of braces. And it's not the language that is stupid, it's you, because you are apparently not indenting your code at all, or you'd realize that indented code in other languages "Fs up" (you do realize you can say "fuck" on Slashdot, right? Watch: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. It's pretty cool.) stuff just as much as indented Python code does. Any decent editor can automatically indent code for you in any language, and in this case Python is even easier because all it uses is the indentation, so you don't have to manually add additional delimiters in the appropriate places; just indent as usual. Copying and pasting code in any language requires you to reindent it just as much as with Python, lest it become an unreadable mess, and again, any decent editor provides the ability to adjust the indentation of whole blocks of text with ease. And if you find yourself utterly stumped by the challenge of generating properly indented code, you simply should not be programming.

Re:Just rename it.

[Speare]

Python's named after the troupe Monty Python, not after the snake species. I don't think renaming it is a good idea, but suitable successors would be [Life of] Brian, [Fish Called] Wanda, Flying Circus, Holy Grail or perhaps start with sub-versions like Cleese, Chapman and Palin.

Alternatively, pick another troupe or favorite comedy show: Fry and Laurie, Mr. Bean, Fawlty Towers or Red Dwarf. Or my favorite, which brings back in the snake species AND British comedy into circular pun, Blackadder.

While talking about puns, snakes and coming full circle, I suggest Ouroboros.

Re:Just rename it.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Otherwise, we'll be left with Python 1, Python 2, Cobra 1, Cobra 1.1, Cobra 1.3, Rattlesnake A, Rattlesnake SP1, Diamondback etc etc

"THAT'S IT! I have had it with these muthafuckin' snakes on the covers of these muthafuckin' O'Reilly books!"
- Guido L. Jackson.

Re:Whiners

[19thNervousBreakdown]

It's almost like there's more than one person with an opinion on this!

Shocking!

[smallpaul]

Guido is following through on the plans he announced years ago! Let's all discuss it as if it were amazingly novel news!

Re:Just rename it.

[morgan_greywolf]

If you think naming closely-related languages the same thing is a kludge, what do you think of naming mostly-unrelated languages the same thing?

You mean like VB.Net?

Re:Just rename it.

[orclevegam]

In addition spam and parrot will now be reserved keywords. Much like goto in Java these will cause compiler errors and output the error messages "but I don't like spam!" and "Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords." respectively.

Re:Just rename it.

[Tritoch]

You could call it "Asp". Oh, wait...

Re:Smartass C programmer says...

[Valdrax]

Python already has C-style string formatting in the form of the % operator.

i.e. print "%03d %03d" % ( num1, num2 )
or, using a hash, print "%(foo)03d %(bar)03d" % { 'foo': num1, 'bar': num2, 'baz': num3 }

So, what exactly is Python missing here, oh wise and mighty smartass C programmer?

If you develop in python

[Anonymous Coward]

and you use && instead of 'and', please try to forget your C background.

Re:Just rename it.

[Ilan Volow]

Supervisor: 'Did you finish debugging your python scripts that update the database?'.

Me: 'Yeah. They're ready to go, and they're all Fawlty now'.

I think we better stick with "Python". Or "Smeghead".

Re:How did that Cripple PHP

[raehl]

PHP 5 was a MAJOR over-haul, biggest since PHP 4.

One can only guess when the next major overhaul will be. Who knows, it might even be PHP 6.

Re:It's a race

[BOFHelsinki]

15% of the google codebase consitutes a "small user base"? Why, yes. Google is a big user but still just one user. So if 15% of Google uses it, it's only 0.15 users. That's a very small user base. Even Mono has a larger user base (Miguel).

Re:It's a race

[Intron]

You could just ask python:

>>>"python" > "perl"
True

Whereas if you ask perl:
perl -e 'print "python" > "perl"'

It remains silent, see?

Keyword replacement

[gokeln]

That's funny. My understanding is that the mods are much more serious than this article lets on. From what I heard they're replacing all the keywords and indentation with some combination of parenthesis, lambda, car and cdr. The language will be SO much improved!