[Zope3-dev] Re: What does python 3000 mean for zope?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

A few months ago I voiced concerns about Python 3000 breaking existing 
codebases and fracturing the community as a result. Various people in 
the community landed on me like a ton of bricks. It wasn't fun.

I think Zope will be on Python 2.x for many years to come. That will 
give Zope a marketing disadvantage compared to frameworks that are 
perhaps newer and less used and can therefore transition to Python 3 
more easily. It will also make us unable to use libraries written anew 
on top of Python 3 and updates of libraries upgraded to Python 3. And 
vice versa, people on Python 3 will be unable to use Zope code, just as 
we're finally getting somewhere with the eggification.

I'm not very positive about this change from the perspective of someone 
using the language. From the perspective of a language maintainer I can 
see the attraction, and I can also see some aspects of the changes being 
beneficial to new and existing developers (and some not; returning 
iterators everywhere isn't going to make life easier for instance). That 
is, beneficial to developers who don't have actual codebases to maintain.

I am hoping that things aren't as bad as I fear and that a combination 
of conversion scripts and a lot of community effort can get us to Python 
3. I'm not holding my breath that this will happen any time soon, though.

Regards,

Martijn