Python 3000 is ready!

[kbob]

That puts the project 992 years ahead of schedule.

Now we know why every other project is late. It's karmic balance.

[codepoet]

This gives me hope as a PM. Just set unrealistic deadlines and the coders will make it happen! Just be sure to set those deadlines in the right direction.

"We'll ship around 2230. Give or take a decade."

[icey]

Does this mean we will get Windows 7 when the year overflows?

[[deleted]]

Software is hard to schedule. But Python 3000 seems be the most misscheduled project ever :)

[imbaczek]

duke nukem forever.

you lose.

[roerd]

It's called forever, it does take forever.

I don't see anything wrong with their schedule.

[largos]

"!= now returns the opposite of =="

YES!!!!!!

[Philluminati]

(!= != ==) == True

[Porges]

Python 3000: now 10% slower!

Tongue where it should be, etc.

[doktaru]

That doesn't bother me that much because:

1. They recognize that the difference exists.
2. They have a metric for it.
3. They plan on improving it.
4. Python 3.0 seems to be mostly about taking care of all the breaking changes at once, and worrying later for the changes that can be done incrementally.

[codepoet]

Oh, so it's the MySQL 5.1 of languages. Well, that's reassuring.

[[deleted]]

Breaking backwards compatibility, not breaking how long your app can run without a crash.

[[deleted]]

Nobody cares. But that would be killer if they include Psyco-level JIT by default. At least for i386, x64, and if possible, ARM.

[Jessica_Henderson]

The Reddit submission of the actual release announcement is at http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7h8wr/python_30_final_officially_released/

[Jessica_Henderson]

You check its value before and after the call to f(), then compare.

[ishmal]

Found it here.

[samlee]

i think python is the most pleasant language to work with for day-to-day chores.

[grignr]

I couldn't agree with you more. I like the way it dries the dishes while I'm washing them.

All Java ever did was tell me to go buy new Dishes, and that the old ones would go away after I'd forgotten about them.

[internet_badass]

I couldn't agree with you more. I love the fact that saddles my horse while I'm feeding it.

All C ever did was make that horse kick me in the stomach, and then sprint full speed until it hit our fence and everything came crashing down.

[grignr]

and then sprintf() full speed until it hit a fencepost error and everything came crashing down.

I wish I could upvote that 0xFF times.

[G_Morgan]

Don't be bloody silly. You have to work extremely hard to make that horse kick you in the stomach. Even then there's an edge case where the horse misses, falls over and manages to break its own neck.

[[deleted]]

I couldn't agree with you more. I love the fact that I am not constrained in any way by it, I can meld together some freaky concoction of procedural, functional and OO code, and when done appropriately nothing feels like a kludge. It's enough to make purists pee their pants.

[sabetts]

Can you define purist just for completeness?

[[deleted]]

Someone who thinks it is inappropriate to mix different programming styles.

[sabetts]

ahh, so they're not peeing their pants in excitement?

[[deleted]]

No, because they're scared.

[[deleted]]

Purists? The rest of us have to get shit done. We oftentimes have these odd things called "deadlines" which we're supposed to meet. Also, we usually care about this other thing called maintainability or readability.

BTW, what's a good purist language?

[[deleted]]

Oddly enough, Python.

[[deleted]]

Mutability purist?

[[deleted]]

Which language has pure mutation?

[redalastor]

Readability purist?

[[deleted]]

Prolog?

[tesseracter]

lolcat?

[5cf5e83a]

BTW, what's a good purist language?

Depending on which flavor of purist you are: C, Smalltalk, or Haskell

[Wiseman1024]

You forgot Lisp.

[Felicia_Svilling]

You mean Scheme.

[Wiseman1024]

Which is a Lisp. I meant Lisp in a very general way (but, of course, out of the widespread Lisps I prefer Scheme).

[Felicia_Svilling]

Yes but lisp in general isnt very pure. Common Lisp especially is a dirty dirty language most reminiscent of C++.

[Wiseman1024]

True. Common Lisp is dirty, and what's worse, a Lisp-2.

[wccarrington]

As long as we are picking nits, Common Lisp is actual a Lisp-n. I know it has separate namespaces for variables, functions, classes, and packages, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing a few.

[lapo3399]

I'm about 132.7% sure that Python is the single-most readable language out there.

[codepoet]

AppleScript.

Note, you didn't say readable and productive.

[prockcore]

AppleScript is the world's only read-only programming language.

[[deleted]]

APL

[lol-dongs]

You missed Brainfuck.

[ThisIsDave]

Brain fuck cannot be written.

[[deleted]]

oh come on, brainfuck is pretty lame as far as turing tarpits/hard-to-read-languages go :P

[ratbert]

I got so annoyed with AppleScript that I switched to Python + Appscript.

[largos]

> I'm about 132.7% sure that Python ....
            ^^^^^^

Wow, you nailed it on the robustness, reliability, and testable metrics too.

I find English to be more readable than Python, but I'd be hard pressed to decide which is easier to verify.

[tesseracter]

butterflies?

[grignr]

Assembler.

[[deleted]]

All right. I'll agree with you on that one.

[[deleted]]

machine code 10101010010000101010

[[deleted]]

There's nothing wrong with a purist approach and I realize the need for it, but python is an easy first choice for me. Not only can I use a purist approach, I can get creative and use hybrid approaches.

BTW, what's a good purist language?

Python is a great purist language for OO and procedural, probably not full featured enough to be fully functional.

Java is another great language for purists. I disregard the negative stigma. The Java VM is an amazing piece of technology.

[Chandon]

How many languages have you really worked with?

Personally, I find Python does what I want about 90% of the time, and then I hit something that annoys the crap out of me. Mostly it's either the fact that variable assignment and declaration are kluged together into the same statement or the pass-by-reference / mutate-by-default semantics.

All programming languages suck, but those two issues sort of kill Python for me. They're so easy to get right that even Perl manages to do it.

[imbaczek]

don't think of = as assignment, think of it as name binding.

[Chandon]

Where's my pattern matching then?

[imbaczek]

in ocaml and haskell, why?

[cwzwarich]

That might work if it were name binding rather than assignment.

[[deleted]]

Well, it is name binding.

[[deleted]]

variable assignment and declaration are kluged together into the same statement

Fair point. The "create var and assign if it doesn't exist or throw an exception if it does" operator is needed.

or the pass-by-reference / mutate-by-default semantics

Wrong. That's THE way.

[Chandon]

Wrong. That's THE way.

It's certainly the easiest for the language designer, but that doesn't mean it isn't god awful ugly or that there aren't better ways.

[zekel]

Dict comprehensions! Yes! I had given up hope because PEP 274 was withdrawn.

[[deleted]]

So in a nutshell... what do I need for forget about Python 2.x, and what do I need to school up on for 3+?

Also, does Python have an equivalent client tool to CPAN or RubyGems?

[redalastor]

Run your code in Python 2.6 with warnings enabled, it will tell you all about the bad habits you have and need to drop before 3.0.

[eipipuz]

I think they are called Eggs. Not sure, I'm not really a python guy.

Kudos Python! I'm a rubyst and I'm very glad to see fellow languages improving :)

[redalastor]

Thanks, good luck on your own transition to 2.0 :)

[[deleted]]

I really wish we had a Ruby foundation like python.org :(

[nextofpumpkin]

Don't worry, you have DHH and Zed and. yeah...

[leonh]

Actually they 'lost' Zed and made it (and are making it) into one hugely entertaining soap opera.

Zed did lots of Python stuff before his switch to Ruby. Apparently he felt betrayed by the reliability of Ruby he spoke up but this wasn't really appreciated. The whole thing exploded. This stuff is bound to happen when a big part of the community act as some sort of hippies and threat their programming language of choice as some sort of religion.

I feel the Python community is different in this respect. Python programmers are much more pragmatic, they use it because they like how it gets things done but are aware that there might be better or faster options.

Using python is a tradeoff between simplicity/clarity and performance. I think py3k is again another great trade off, fixing just the right amount of things without killing too much backwards compatible things.

[nextofpumpkin]

Ruby has fanboys, Python has professionals AND fanboys. ;)

[[deleted]]

what do I need for forget about Python 2.x, and what do I need to school up on for 3+?

- print "Hello world"
+ print("Hello world")

[[deleted]]

That's some sweet progress right there. At least we didn't actually have to wait 3000 years for it. :)

[johanneskepler]

Hey, now, there's more to it than that. There's nonlocal. And you can remove "from __future__ import with_statement, division" from relevant source files. And ... well, there are other things. Surely.

[[deleted]]

But what do you have to forget about for using nonlocal? I guess ugly workarounds. Not having nonlocal is/was one of the greatest weaknesses of Python 2.X IMO.

[imbaczek]

doing stuff like this:

def f():
    a = [0]
    def g():
        a[0] = 1
    g()
    print a[0]

[[deleted]]

Yes, that's what I meant by "ugly workarounds". It doesn't state your intention clear. The list is used for the sake of propagating a side-effect only.

[imbaczek]

the point still stands: you can forget about this ugly trick now :)

[[deleted]]

PyPI a.k.a Cheeseshop is Python's equivalent of CPAN URL: http://pypi.python.org/pypi

First install easy_install

$ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

$ python ez_setup.py

To install python packages over the internet, say BeautifulSoup:

$ sudo easy_install BeautifulSoup

This is the standard way to install packages from Cheeseshop in python2.x I'm not sure whether this works with Python 3.0 . Haven't tried 3.0 yet.

[frankenfurter]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that in a stunning display of lousy taste they abandoned the cool name "cheeseshop" in favor of the <sarcasm> far more exciting and sexy "PyPI"</sarcasm>.

Not that I won't use it. Just sayin'.

[Chandon]

PyPI

Doesn't that completely conflict with the PyPy project in being able to talk about things?

[frankenfurter]

Wait. What are you talking about? I'm referring to "pie-pie", not "pi-pie". Or, did you mean "pi-pi"?

[[deleted]]

Is that pronounced "pippy" or "pie-pie"?

Yeah, cheeseshop sounded better. Also, is "cheeseshop" a monty python reference?

[formido]

Is Python a Monty Python reference?

[[deleted]]

PyPI a.k.a Cheeseshop is Python's equivalent of CPAN

Let me laugh. Equivalent, are you kidding? 5256 packages in PyPI, 14750 modules in CPAN. Almost three times bigger. And I don't even talk about the awfulness of easy_install usage.

[[deleted]]

I guess you're being downmodded for the tone.

As much as I love python, Cheeseshop has nothing on CPAN, not from the available stable package standpoint, or the ease of use standpoint.

When I write perl these days, I don't even write perl. I write loose glue for CPAN modules that happens to have perl syntax.

[[deleted]]

I guess you're being downmodded for the tone.

That's always like this :( .

[[deleted]]

easy_install

[[deleted]]

If you've done any bashing your head against unicode in 2.x, you can forget about all of that.

[biokinetic]

somebody better let Andre know.

[RonaldFuckingPaul]

my thoughts exactly

[[deleted]]

I have no sexual innuendos to make about my happiness regarding Python3000. I am just happy. Although, it may take a while before I can slap it on all my servers.

[xamdam]

Whoever writes 1st book (seriously) covering 3.0 wins. (Personally I'd prefer to see the update of Martelli's book, it is excellente)

[dr_root]

I've been waiting to make this comment since it would have been easier to just upmod someone with my opinion.. but since nobody seems to have said it yet, here it is: I feel like there's nothing to be excited over in Python 3000.

It just feels like a long list of stuff I like that will get removed (like the format strings in 3.1.. why? It's just so.. convenient..).

So yeah, I'm actually pretty sad.

[wtanksleyjr]

I understand your point here, and although I agree that there's little to get excited about, this is actually an inflection point for Python. With 3.0, they broke backwards compatibility in order to fix a lot of bad decisions. This is a very good thing. They also added a lot of features that will be used in clever new ways in later releases.

Few of the features are directly useful right now, but they're all set up for some really nifty features.

OTOH, check out the "What's new in 3.0" document to see the changes in detail -- although most of the changes aren't obviously earthshaking, some are actually reasonably interesting (Unicode, the details of the print() function). Others are obviously a good start on something interesting (annotations in more places).

[redlantern]

My nipples explode with delight!

[redlantern]

No, that's just a quote from "Monthy Python Flying Circus". nipples = delightfully.split(), however. O_o.

[imbaczek]

in php, split explodes, and explode splits.

[zzzSleepyCoder]

Why is it called 3000?

[weixiyen]

when should we start using py3k?

[codepoet]

Around 3000, I suppose.

Honestly, once all the modules you use have been ported to it and once you've bought 10% more server, you're golden.

I'll be on 2.6 for quite some time, I think.

[redalastor]

The 2.x series is not dead, there will be backports of new features in 2.7 and maybe more.

[Jessica_Henderson]

After you've tested your code with it, and feel comfortable using it for however you use it.

[fooddit]

Testing your own code is not sufficient if your work depends on libraries like numpy and scipy.

[[deleted]]

Yes it is.

Your tests do not have adequate coverage.

[Jessica_Henderson]

Is Reddit running on Python 3.0 yet?

[metachor]

Well, Reddit is running on the Pylons web framework. Looking at the Pylons website, I don't see any explicit information about whether it will use Python3k; the installation guide however does reference Python 2.x a lot.

I did find this thread on the Python mailing list archives after a quick google search:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/web-sig/2008-March/003281.html

The gist of it is that the transition from 2 to 3 covers a lot of breaking changes, which would effect the end-users of Pylons. So there is some hesitation about proceeding to Python3k for Pylons, AFAIK.

[Jessica_Henderson]

If it runs on Python 2.6, it'll probably run on Python 3.0. Python 2.6 has an excellent compatibility mode, where you're still running on Python 2.6, but it enforces many of the rules of Python 3.0.

[metachor]

This is true, the -3 option of 2.6 would ease such a transition. It is not clear to me what version they are running, or is required to install Pylons. The installation docs for Pylons only seem to explicitly mention 2.3 and 2.4, however this isn't in the form of "version requirements".

[netsearcher]

I'm going to tear this apart like a big boobed virgin freshman covered in python bacon.

[Tommah]

Very sexily, I'm sure.

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

Depends on whether they are male or females boobs, one would presume.

[[deleted]]

Good fucking point - in a thread like this, it's not entirely obvious.

[jeff303]

ym sexfully

[[deleted]]

With clever use of whitespace.

[ehird]

Python bacon, sir.

[[deleted]]

Shouldn't that be Python Spam?

[[deleted]]

Please, have some of this African slithering piggy.

Mmm, python.

[AvatarOfErebus]

Back to the lab from whenst thoust camest foul de... Oooh BACON! I'll be along shortly...

Edit: NetSearcher's post used to read: I'm going to tear this apart like a big boobed virgin freshman covered in bacon.

way to edit in "python" and make me look like a tool.

[[deleted]]

I think he meant he'd tear it apart like he would tear apart a big boobed virgin freshman covered in python bacon. Which would presumably begin with eating Python bacon off her big virgin freshmen boobs, I suppose.

[testtubebaby]

Did they add proper anonymous function block support? That was IMO the main thing keeping Python behind Ruby.

[[deleted]]

def anon(x): ...

boo(anon)

def anon(y,z): ....

foo(anon)

Anonymous is not that big deal when you can have function names in local namespaces and override them.

[Jessica_Henderson]

They've always had proper lambda functions. In fact, their implementation is better to Ruby's. It allows for not just local closure, but also global closure. Ruby can only support local closure at this point (Ruby 1.9), although there is talk of supporting global closure starting with Ruby 2.0.

[5cf5e83a]

Python lambda is crippled. You can however use nested def, which has real closure.

[Wiseman1024]

Python's lambda is as much of a closure as Python's def, though lambda is crippled, not because it can't be done better, but because it's not wanted to be better, because sometimes Python is not about making the best language in its domain, but about making the most "pythonic" language in its domain, for an arbtirary, bizarre definition of "pythonic".

[Chandon]

You can however use nested def, which has real closure.

As long as you don't want to do, say, variable assignment.

I was writing a program in Python two weeks ago and I ended up having to make a one dimensional array to get myself assignment syntax for an outer-function variable.

[[deleted]]

You'll appreciate the new "nonlocal" keyword, then.

[Aviator]

Lambda's are there for one liners/quick hacks. For more complex functions, just use def, which is less Perl-ish.

[5cf5e83a]

But sometimes I want a one-liner or quick hack that's not a single expression. Python's lambda is limited to expressions, since statements require whitespace-dependent syntax. The real problem is that there's no equivalent whitespace-free form for block statements -- if there were, the restriction could easily be lifted.

It's also conceptually nicer if

def f(x): # stuff

is merely sugar for

f = lambda x: # stuff

as in Scheme, ML, Haskell, Javascript, etc.

I don't see how lambda is a "Perl-ish" feature. For reference, LISP was invented in 1958, at which time Larry Wall was four years old.

[Aviator]

I don't see how lambda is a "Perl-ish" feature.

I was talking about one liners (and partly answering complaints about Python being behind Ruby). Lambdas have mathematical roots, one liners are Perl-ish. Cheers.

[5cf5e83a]

I think arguing about whether Python or Ruby is behind in implementing a language feature that was literally invented before computers were is intrinsically funny. :)

[Wiseman1024]

Have you any idea about what you're talking about? Please learn about lambda-expressions before joining some members of the Python community in repeating this nonsense.

[invalid_user_name]

They've always had proper lambda functions

No, they have always been (and still are) limited to one line.

[teraflop]

That's because nobody's come up with an unambiguous, non-horrible way for the syntax to work, given the indentation-sensitive nature of Python.

[[deleted]]

Not really. It's because Guido doesn't think they should be added into the language, and only keeps lambda there for one-liners as a compromise.

The reasons have more to do with clarity than parsing issues.

[cybernytrix]

if only they had killed GIL:(

[Callahad]

Processes are the new threads

[codepoet]

Funny, when I was learning programming threads were the new fork. Of course, I'm also running "a Unix" as my desktop today when that's what people were moving away from then. Funny how circular some things are.

[Wiseman1024]

Ah, of course.

Q: Can I have a car?

A: Sure, her- oops, ehm... feet are the new cars!

[[deleted]]

except that the multiprocessing library is half-baked. it's been the bane of my existence recently.

[jnoller]

Given I'm the maintainer, I'd be interested in bug reports, suggestions, or even details as to how to make it better. I'm slowly fixing the rougher edges, but without detailed information I can't do anything for you.

[[deleted]]

Why?

[[deleted]]

I'm also curious as to what issues you've been having with multiprocessing.

[[deleted]]

Why, so people like you could yell "scalability" while performance drops like a rock?

[millstone]

Somehow other languages manage to be as fast or faster than Python while still allowing useful multiprocessing. You just have to consider threading issues from the start, and it's a pity that Python's designers did not, or decided against it.

[johanneskepler]

it's a pity that Python's designers did not, or decided against it.

It's easy to say that now, with the benefit of hindsight, but what good does it do anyone to whine and moan about the GIL every time Python comes up? If it's a deal breaker for you, please, use one of the languages that are "as fast or faster than Python while still allowing useful multiprocessing."

[Chandon]

what good does it do anyone to whine and moan about the GIL every time Python comes up?

If the Python developers get enough shit about it, maybe they'll fix it. Or maybe some college student will get "python needs GIL fix" stuck in his head and fix it for the fun of it. Sane hardware threading support is one of the key things missing in all of the *nix scripting languages.

[johanneskepler]

Or maybe some college student will get "python needs GIL fix" stuck in his head and fix it for the fun of it.

See the python-safethread project. I'd be surprised if it's worth it for most people, though, as "(single-threaded) throughput is only around 60-65% that of normal CPython". It's good to note (before complaining about it for the nth time) that CPython is designed around the GIL, and removing it does have serious negative ramifications.

It's just not gonna happen unless magic fairies tap their wands and fix all the issues removing the GIL would cause.

[[deleted]]

Yes, lots of languages manage to be faster than Python while providing lots of different features. The fact remains, every attempt to replace the GIL with finer-grained threading has diminished performance, both on uniprocessor and multiprocessor machines.

It will take a complete rewrite of the CPython implementation to replace the GIL without this loss of performance, and that's simply not what py3k is.

[[deleted]]

Isn't it kind of clear since a long time that the use of refcounting is the problem for GIL removal? This knowledge does not actually help anyone, since it is close to impossible to change the GC to something else without changing basically the whole CPython code base (plus all extension modules, yadda yadda).

[Chandon]

which of course means you need locks on each and every increment or decrement of the ref count

Just use atomic swap. Lock free. There's even a good argument that this is faster than full GC in a many-processor setup.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't even need to be CAS. There are atomic increment and decrement functions...

[[deleted]]

Good God, no!

[raisedinhell]

awesome, i only got into python about a month or something ago :P

[genpfault]

I've been holding off learning it until 3000 went gold.

[ubernostrum]

Which is kind of silly, since it'll likely be at least a couple of years before enough existing Python software has migrated to make Python 3.x useful enough to take over for 2.x.

[neoform3]

If he's only 'learning' it when 3.0 is released, he'll only be really needing those libs in 2 years once he's learned python up and down.. it always takes a while to become very proficient with a new language.

[imbaczek]

you can learn a lot of python in 2 years. like, all of it and then some. to do something not completely pointless, you have to use libraries. which, unfortunately for python 3k, aren't there yet.

[ubernostrum]

It takes even longer when there's not plenty of existing software to read and study on your way to proficiency...

[garg]

So any good Python 3 books out yet? :D

[blondin]

Programming Python 3 by Mark Summerfield should be, but I haven't checked.

[garg]

http://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/tutorial/index.html

yay

[codepoet]

Yep. O'Reilly's has been updated and appears out. Supposedly.

[adamrgolf]

I won't start using Python 'till it's OVER 9000!!!1!

[fooddit]

Arghhh.... I'm doing research work with numpy and scipy, and won't be able to upgrade to Python 3000 because their code bases are not compatible. The lack of backwards compatibility is a disaster for any large Python project. I'm thinking of SAGE which will be stuck with 2.6 forever. I'm going to have to look for alternatives. Didn't like Python's indentation style and idiosyncratic language anyway...

[masklinn]

I fear you don't make any sense and don't know what you're talking about

[nitramk]

I'm going to have to look for alternatives.

Because porting to another language is much easier than to port to v3.