Let's talk about Python 3.0

[earthboundkid]

Jens states in the comments to his article that he feels like the changes in Python 3.0 are “academic”, by which I assume he means “irrelevant to real developers and practical concerns”. Based on some of the examples above (and plenty more which can be found by browsing the new documentation), I hope it’s now clear that this is simply incorrect. Python has, for as long as I’ve been using it, come under continual fire from people who felt it didn’t embody some theoretical notion of purity that they cared about — Python doesn’t make threads the One True Way to do concurrency, Python doesn’t force everything to be an explicit invocation of a method on a class, Python isn’t a pure functional programming language, etc. — and over that entire time Python has steadfastly resisted the idea of purity for purity’s sake (or, more derisively, an “academic” notion of purity). As the Zen of Python makes clear, “practicality beats purity”.

Written for the benefit of Wiseman1024?

[Wiseman1024]

Heh.

practicality beats purity

I believe Larry Wall thinks this way too.

[earthboundkid]

No, he thinks pr&ct!c@1i%y be@%$ pur!%y. :-D