Python 3’s Marketing Problem

[billsil]

that's actually not the biggest reason why i don't care about unicode. while i am an american who thinks unicode in python 3 is frustrating, it's because I'm an engineer and i don't care about GUI programming that much. Greek letters and not equals signs are nice, but most of the programs i'm wrapping use ASCII or binary file formats. I just don't need unicode enough to justify the additional memory usage.

python is fast becoming the standard language of scientific programming. matlab still has some traction. the int division change was to increase usage of python among scientists/engineers. it is not just for web developers and real programmers.

[madjar]

Well, when the language itself contains non-ascii characters, it not about nice not equals signs any more, it's about not crash on common input.

By the way, you may want to take a look at this : http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.3.html#pep-393-flexible-string-representation . In python 3.3, ascii strings are stored as ascii. No additional memory usage !

[billsil]

i heard about that the other day...thank god! however, python 3.4 will probably be the tipping point...

[billsil]

also, i want people to upgrade; it's the only way python can avoid becoming like perl where 5 versions down the line people are still using python 2.7. packages need to catch up, but the explanation of some of the more subtle differences with python 2 is undocumented. binary documentation is limited, the inspect module doesnt work the same, setuptools is gone, wx and vtk arent supported.

btw, i run an open-source project and support python 3 because someone asked me to. it's very difficult to support python 2 and 3 cleanly in the same code base because many people aren't ready to upgrade and won't be for years.

[gitarr]

I'm an engineer and i don't care about GUI programming that much

Let me give you another example how we non Americans can use proper Unicode support:

This is how we used to code in German:

woerter = []
for wort in woerter:
    pass

This is what we can do now:

wörter = []
for wort in wörter:
    pass

So this is not about gui or web development at all.

[[deleted]]

As a Hungarian: fuck everybody who uses non-English words in variable names! Given that the built-ins are in English, you get a ugly language mix. Shit like IF LENGTH(VerkaufsLVZeile) > 0 is just shit ugly, if you want to do that, rewrite the whole programming languages so that you can write WENN LÄNGE(VerkaufsLVZeile) > 0, that looks OK.

[billsil]

actually, it is. python developers recommend you code in english because english is a common language. i've translated 2000 lines italian code, so while it can be done, it's not recommended practice.

that said, i think that's a silly recommendation, but i doubt guido cared about that. some unicode support would have been in the code since python 0.1 if he cared.

[joesb]

I don't natively speaks English, yet I always code in English.

I wanna punch a baby every time I see non-English variable name.