You asked me a specific question. I said that the reason is the lack of resources. I didn't realize that we were talking about the decline and fall of the Python world.

I remember reading "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer." And "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer." It's a special kind of consultant who can get paid both coming and going.

Python is in decline? How do you reckon that? In my work, Python is the de factor high-level language for chemical informatics, molecular modeling, structure visualization, and the like. This is much improved over the last 10 years, and won't be dying in as short a time-span as two years in the future. No, most projects haven't migrated to Python 3. Yes, it will be annoying. So was porting client code from IRIX to Linux. That happens.

Really, you need to plan for it. And it sounds like you didn't plan for the division operator change. The ideas of that change first surfaced during user testing under the 1.x days, with Alice. That change decision was publicized in spring 2001, with PEP 238. The "from __future__ import division" was made available in Python 2.2. The runtime even has the -Q option so you can tell it to print warnings wherever there's a problem. The nice thing about this change is that it's purely a syntax issue which can be handled on a per-module basis, and mixed with modules which weren't compiled this way.

These all worked for 2.5, so what was the problem you experienced?

What I'm "defending" is my sense that Something is Wrong on the Internet. It sounds like you're doing things the wrong way. You expect certain behaviors which were never promised or implied, you don't read the update notices, and you don't use the tools which help you achieve the goals you want. No wonder you get so frustrated with Python! But I don't see what the Python developers could have done better, given the resources they had, and given that they care about goals that do not interest you.

You're going to run into the same problems with Clojure. Looking now, it seems that 1.3 broke code. Some things were removed, there were changes to the contrib namespace, and some third-party modules didn't work. Various places say it was a hassle to deal with. Sound familiar? How are you sure something like that will never happen again?

> I didn't realize that we were talking about the decline and fall of the Python world.

The article is called "I Am Worried About The Future Of Python" and the specific thread I chose to participate in directly described a way that the Python 3 schism was contributing to the concern (WinRT support). To quote the lead comment for this thread: "I definitely feel like Python qua programming language has become a missed opportunity in many ways".

I then provided my experience, as someone who has been developing for over 20 years in numerous languages (even designing them and teaching them in a university setting), of a unique set of challenges and mistakes that I see Python having run across--a perspective that one reader called "a brilliant if unpopular analysis"--and yet I'm now simply being dragged into the same defensive argument that comes up whenever the 2/3 topic is breached: to turn it into a very personal attack against me and my abilities led by highly inflammatory and insulting wording like "get this into your head", quite despite the fact that I am hardly in the minority with regards to these overall opinions.

Regardless, I am hereby so confused as to what conversation you feel you are participating in that I am just going to bow out: thank you, regardless, for taking the time to respond.

(Oh, I will respond to the semi-unrelated Clojure discussion, as I should probably make certain I don't inadvertently cause them problems: I do not use third-party libraries written in Clojure, as there is really no need given that all of Java is accessible; this already stops most of these problems. Also, the way Clojure 1.3 broke code is closer to the way Ruby 1.9 broke code--a change I stated elsewhere in this thread was a non-issue for the Ruby projects I'm involved in--than the way Python 3 broke code, and was in fact even less of an issue than that.)

I deliberately used the inflammatory phrase "in your head" because you used the phrase "What really seems to happen with Python is that people get it in their heads "developers should not be using this old feature"". The 'people' you are talking about there are the Python core developers. Those are specific people, not abstract entities. I figured that since you used that phrase with them, then I would reverse it, when saying that that wasn't the point.

I've been using Python now for 15+ years. I've read articles about bemoaning the lost opportunities of Python for almost as long. It needs static types otherwise all is lost. It needs tail recursion otherwise all it lost. It needs macros, it needs to get rid of explicit "self", it needs blocks, ... and so on. People thought for a while that Python development was proceeding too fast. There was the language moratorium so others could catch up. Now you say it's going too slow.

If you want to give me specific details about how Python is losing in popularity, please do. You haven't. Nothing I've seen tells me that there's anything more than the usual churn of people moving in between languages, of hipsters talking about the language de jour, of industry people insisting on certain trends. But what you've written describing your experiences with Python's 2-3 transition does not mesh with my own experiences and readings of the experiences of others. How did the change in division cause problems? Why weren't the existing mitigation mechanisms good enough for you?

I truly am going to stick to my word and ignore the rest of your commentary about Python: there is a long thread with a lot of context started by an article that is at least attempting to disagree with your premise; the things you are asking me to explain are thereby all "assumed state" for this tiny sub-part of the conversation, so you can take up your issues with someone up-thread who might feel less insulted by the overall direction of the argument you are making.

However, I will defend my wording, as I think that is unrelated: the phrase "once you get it into your head that" (even with that direct "you", rephrased from "people get the idea into their heads", about others) is a statement about the virility of the idea that someone now believes; in contrast, "get this into your head" is a direct command given to a person used to indicate that they are being dense and thereby are unable (or unwilling) to understand the idea in question.

To make this distinction more clear, you can look at something generally considered positive: "once saurik gets it into his head that something should be built, he builds it" or "people get the idea in their heads that things should be built, and then they actually build them" are both fine; "get this into your head: once you determine something should be built, you should actually build it" is both harsh and patronizing: it is an entirely different concept for the sentence, used as an attack.

As someone who started this sub-thread I have to say I read it with pleasure: it is informative and broad, I learned some from it, and I wanted to thank you, saurik, for your input and perspective, even though I don't fully agree. I have nothing to say ad rem, at least nothing that wasn't said already, but I wanted to comment on that unfortunate phrase. As I see it, there was no malicious, "harsh and patronizing" intent behind it; I agree that it was not particularly polite, but I feel it wasn't very brutal an attack either. So please, don't hold it against your adversary (or, God forbid, Python community) or at least please try to not be offended - I'm almost 100% sure it wasn't meant to be offensive in the first place.

Again, very informative discussion, thanks.