So much cleaner and more consistent. Classic classes are gone for good!
Unlike with other languages (which I won't name for fear of offense!) I think Pythonistas will actually migrate to this much improved Python (well, forgetting the 10% performance hit) especially as such focus has been put into making tools to make it easier, unlike with PHP 4->5 (oops..!)
Sorry, no. I do most of my work in Python and would love to see quick Py3k adoption. But 2.3 was released 29-Jul-2003 and is still the baseline for portable code. Pythonistas are just as much a victim to the forces against migration as PHP and "other language" coders.
Just for kicks, try getting a stable webapp stack running on 2.6. I'm still not near ready to put that into production (and I run tiny, tiny websites).
The Python LDAP and psycopg2 libraries are my biggest culprits.
My point is not that it's impossible to run 2.6; but setting it up requires a level of sophistication with Python/*nix that I can't put on the shoulders of my organization, yet.
If I were working with a couple of smart hackers, this would be a non-issue. But my feeling is my organization is like a lot of others, where anything that's not a tagged, stable "sudo apt-get install" away is not going to fly.
Ahh, yeah it does require a good bit of familiarity with both python and *nix environments.
I'm a lone guy, managing my own servers, with complete control over their environments. That's quite a bit different than a business environment, corporate or not.
The latest draft of Linux Standard Base appears to specify Python 2.4. I wish we could rely on everyone having ctypes and ElementTree in the standard library, but no luck.
(I think web.py 0.3 and possibly the trunk of Django can handle Py2.6, but obviously they're not going to drop support for older versions any time soon.)
The net result of the 3.0 generalizations is that Python 3.0 runs the pystone benchmark around 10% slower than Python 2.5. Most likely the biggest cause is the removal of special-casing for small integers. There’s room for improvement, but it will happen after 3.0 is released!
I expect it's just a case of removing optimizations in order to get everything stable, then they can start work on new optimizations. I'm not a Python dev though, so elaboration would be cool ;-)
True, migrating to PHP4 to 5 wasn't pretty, but 5 was an order of magnitude improvement over 4 and so worth the cost. Not sure if the same can be said for this new Py release. I'm still doing everything in 2.6(which was a recent move from 2.5). Too many libraries that aren't out for 3 yet.
Also, a lot of the scripts that power Gnome and Debian are written in Python. Ubuntu also seems to do most new work in Python. So I expect Python 2.X to be the default in distros for quite some time, probably until a 3.1 release or later.
Unlike with other languages (which I won't name for fear of offense!) I think Pythonistas will actually migrate to this much improved Python (well, forgetting the 10% performance hit) especially as such focus has been put into making tools to make it easier, unlike with PHP 4->5 (oops..!)