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

[Martijn Faassen]

David Pratt wrote:
> Yes these are all fairly painful scenarios. What's worse is the scenario 
> for organizations evaluating zope end user software using python 2. It's 
> will not be a great selling feature to start with the premise that 
> anything you see today will require major refactoring to give provide a 
> measure of 'futureproof' code.
> 
> It is also possible that as so long as you are tied to python 2 you may 
> be fighting the impression that you are speeding toward obsolescence. 
> Regardless, I expect this impression to develop outside the python 
> community and formalized as a marketing tool against python 
> applications. This will come into play when it is common knowledge that 
> P3K is stable and virtually all python technology runs on python 2. I 
> can see possible wins here for ruby and java as they will be evaluated 
> without this inherent risk.

Agreed with this marketing risk.

Note that Ruby is going through a similar transition right now though - 
as far as I understand there are a number of new interpreters (on new 
platforms) and compatibility changes in the air. Not sure though.

> Porting will have to come soon; otherwise the risk is loose the ability 
> to market zope. Zope is in the fray with other frameworks in python and 
> other languages. Not seeing a zope emerging in P3K (as it is evolving) 
> is likely going to mean a challenging sell for anyone getting involved 
> with the framework (whether you are a developer or consumer). Consumers 
> need to know their data will survive this potential (think about all 
> those pickles).

Porting will be a huge cost to the community and I'm not sure the gain 
outweighs the damage such an effort will inevitably cause.

[snip]
> P3K has the potential to disrupt zope and its marketing unless there is 
> a means of handling this through planning (with stakeholders whose code 
> is used in zope). The similarity of P3K to Y2K gives me some doubt that 
> the branding 'Python 3000' will be seen as the best. I likely won't be 
> the last to draw this similarity and the potential for P3K to put major 
> python projects like zope in turmoil for years.

Yes, it sucks, doesn't it? When I pointed something like this out to 
Guido he got very upset with me, as he felt I was implying he hadn't 
thought the thing through enough. :)

Another approach is the "Ignore until it goes away" approach. Perhaps 
with developments like Jython, IronPython and PyPy, plus the existing 
infrastructure, the Python 2 community will be a stronger bet than 
Python 3. The language developers will decide just in time to give up 
Python 3. :) I consider this unlikely - the language developers are 
determined do to this, and changing Python fulfills the needs of *their* 
open source community, which is to develop and improve the language.

Mainly when thinking about Python 3 I just get somewhat depressed as 
there really doesn't seem to be a very good way forward in this, unless, 
again, a 2to3 conversion script works better than I expect, or someone 
hacks up a joint interpreter which can run both Python 2 and Python 3 
code simultaneously. The core developers are not planning on such and 
it'd be an non-trivial effort, though.

Regards,

Martijn