Comment who cares that 3.2's "features" aren't backported? (Score 0) 164
let's take a look at the "major" changes in 3.2:
- stable ABI,
- argparse: a nice update to optparse, but can easily be ported since it's just a module written in pure python. definitely not compelling enough of a reason to upgrade
- dictionary-based configuration for logging: again, not compelling at all when weighed against the syntax changes in py3k. also, just a module, can easily be back-ported.
- concurrency tools. there might be something interesting there
- wsgi, email library modules: looks like they are fixing things that were fouled up by the ascii->unicode switch. these are problems you would not have if you had stayed with python2
etc. etc. etc. Python3.{0,1,2} includes many things that would be nice additions to the language, but are totally not worth the headache. Think if all of those library authors had actually been enhancing their own libraries instead of rewriting the same features to fit into the py3k language changes. Take a look at PEP3000 and PEP3100. There really is no killer feature, nor do all the little upgrades collectively constitute a killer feature. It's just bad PR to cause so much work for the Python community for no discernible benefit.
Sure there are several things that "didn't quite make sense with python" but a lot of them were in libraries that could be deprecated and then removed. Or just deprecated. Successful languages don't change. The "purity" of the language is a bunch of ivory tower computer scientist BS that may very well tank the popularity of the language just as it was coming into its own. I hope they find a way to fix this that does not require everyone to just rewrite their python code to be py3k compatible. I know it's really not that much work, but again, there is no tangible reward for this effort.
When someone can point me to a real benefit that py3k brings that *could not* be achieved without the backward-compatibility break, then I will re-consider my position and even consider upgrading myself. Until then, I will be frustrated that the core dev team has caused busy work for everyone.