TechTakes

I mean, this is why I left during the Python 3 arguments. It was obvious that the core development team only functions to the extent that it can improve the (economic) exploitability of CPython by the consortium which has captured it, and that we'd become so technically dysfunctional that we were no longer able to implement forward-compatible syntax, something we'd had as recently as Python 2.5 but had lost by Python 2.7. The inability of the various "authority" groups like PyCA or PyPA to get things done once-and-for-all is another symptom; there is still no single holistic solution for cryptography or packaging in Python 3.

Like, I recall having dinner with Guido and Barry (and others; like ten of us at a Chinese restaurant) in Montreal. It was very obvious that Guido not only didn't grok concepts like pure functions or capabilities or asynchrony, but fundamentally not interested in how they could improve the state of software engineering; he is forever in the mindset of making a teaching language, not a professional language. I also recall discussing with him years earlier (Portland?) about how libraries like Twisted or Django fundamentally only justify their existence by pointing to deficiencies in the standard library, and he didn't understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all. At least he's a nice person; at no point was there any yelling or tenseness, and I appreciate that.

That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn't prefer it, and I only choose it when there's a clear developer-time tradeoff, because I know that its maintainers are contemptuous of me merely for using Python 2.7 and PyPy.