Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pyre 4172 days ago
As someone who has been both a Perl and a Python programmer, I don't feel like Python3 is going to kill Python. Why?

- Python3 currently exists, and there is a large push to get the majority of the "big" packages to support it (many of which do currently support Python 2.x and Python3).

- It's possible for a Python package to support both Python 2.x and Python3 at the same time or to program the Python 2.x version in such a way that converters like 2to3 can do the conversion for you. I'm aware of no such tools or capabilities between Perl 5.x and Perl 6.

- Python3 isn't as ambitious as Perl 6 is/was.

Edit: As to point #2, I recall that there may have existed (maybe it still does?) some project to use Perl 6's "reprogram the grammar" capabilities to turn Perl 6 into Perl 5. I'm not sure how I really feel about that though. There was also a time when there was some buzz around Parrot VM[1] that was associated with Perl 6 (I don't know if it was some official partnership or just some announcement of Perl 6 support in Parrot).

[1] http://www.parrot.org/

1 comments

Indeed, big libraries supporting Python 3 is rapidly growing http://py3readiness.org

Heck, apart from few - even those which are not supporting Py3k now have alternative package in PyPi. So it's positive sign.