On Mon, 2009-06-15 at 16:12 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote: > On 06/15/2009 03:22 PM, David G. Mackay wrote: > > Python will let you develop programs very quickly, the first time. The > > problem is that you'll have to go back and redo the code when a > > different version of python is released. There are major > > incompatibilities between 2.5 and 3.0. > > afaik, this is the first time there is such a major change coming down > the python line - even then, I feel its been well documented and there > are atleast a couple of automated harness to help along the process. That's correct, if you stick to pure python coding. Once again, if you look at zope, which makes extensive use of the C api, they've had fits with just about every release. > I agree its not ideal, far from it - for anyone on any language. But > then if you look at it py3 isnt going to be around for c5 or c6, who > knows what other tooling might be available further into the future. > > > Also, there are several engineers at Red Hat that are very unhappy with > > the impact that the 3.0 release is going to have on them. > > But the changes have been known for a while right ? and are'nt most > people already making changes that allows their code to migrate well > over to 3.0 when its around ? Probably. However, most developers would rather spend their resources on adding new features to their product rather than making changes just to stay compatible with the current language version. I believe that, even with the migration tools, people are still going to have to manually convert portions of their code. I haven't really followed it that closely since I won't be converting more than a few short scriptlets. > > The bottom line is that you can probably get your project done faster in > > python. But if you have a lot of code that you're going to need to > > maintain, you're much better off with java, which actually has a lot of > > input from the user community, and respects their user base. > > Given that large numbers of java people are jumping ship into the ruby > camp, I dont know how much of that is really true anymore. More and more > of the companies that I know about ( specially the really smart ones ) > are either already on ruby for a significant portion of their work, or > are in the process of moving. Sigh. Yet another language. I guess that I'll have to take a look at ruby. Dave