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by sitkack 5 days ago
I have used Python as my main language since the late 90s and it has been over the last decade and half been getting more unserious.

It would be nice if cpython opened up a bit, pluggable GC and JIT would go along way towards reducing this manufactured drama.

It wasn't cool to see PyPy or Stackless getting sidelined.
1 comments
woodruffw 5 days ago
This isn't really a substantive comment, and to at least one extent it's trivially falsifiable (15 years is before Python 3 became usable, so that alone is a "serious" change in the language).

> pluggable GC and JIT would go along way

One of the points mentioned in the linked discussion is explicitly about ensuring that the JIT design enables multiple implementations.

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sitkack 5 days ago
Python 2 to 3 transition was also unserious.

The flippant attitude of cpythons wrt the standard library is also unfortunate.

Please with your substantive comment comment.

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woodruffw 5 days ago
It seems to have been serious enough; I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3.

> Please with your substantive comment comment.

I think binning things as drama isn't substantive, particularly when noting about the linked conversation seems dramatic. I also think they're actually talking about the thing you want (pluggable JIT), so the objection seems incongruous.

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anticorporate 5 days ago
> I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3.

I assumed Python 2 was pretty much ubiquitous and that the world wasn't adopting Python 3 very quickly for a long time, but I do wonder if the applications I was working with a decade and a half ago (ArcGIS, Blender, Civ4, lots of Red Hat system tools, etc.) biased that viewpoint.

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cdavid 4 days ago
That's debatable. We can't go back in history, but if it were not for ML/data science, I believe python 3 would have killed python. At that time web dev / CLI utilities were major use cases, and that was the time golang became mainstream.

Data science, and then ofc DL being done through python just when python 3 was kinda usable (around 3.3/3.4) was a struck of luck timing-wise.

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