Python Family Gets a Triplet Of Updates

The Python developers have been busy this weekend, releasing three new versions at different points on the Python continuum: 2.7.4 (a 2.7 series bugfix release), 3.2.4 (what's new), and production releases 3.3.1. Here's what's new in 3.3.1.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

hair-raisingly complex

You're an idiot.

extremely bloated

Nonsense.

poor libraries

Maybe.

quite limited functionality

Ridiculous.

A feature still missing

[Urkki]

A very important feature of any language still seems to be missing: a sane reference documentation.

In a duck-typed language this is even more important, because compiler/IDE can't really help programmer there. Below is a sample from core library docs, links included. To fully appreciate this, there's no link to this "read()" method, and whole BytesIO class documentation does not contain such method, so you're going be manually searching the page to find documentation for read(). Fortunately it is on the same page, which conveniently documents entire module, so it's really easy to quickly find particular piece of information in that wall of text.

read1()

In BytesIO [python.org], this is the same as read()

Re:Not that surprising

[lattyware]

That's how you end up being PHP. Python 3 fixes core mistakes made in earlier versions of the language, and makes it harder to write bad code. That's a good thing, and the last thing you want is a language full of 20 ways to do something, 18 of which are deprecated. Removing backwards compatibility for the 3.x line was a good idea.

Re:2.7.4

[mrvan]

I think it is 'dependencies dependencies' more than laziness. Few real-world projects depend only on the stdlib, and for these projects it is necessary to wait for at least the majority of depencies to adopt 3.x before porting becomes feasible, even if the porting itself is relatively straightforward. Of course, you can fork any dependencies and port them yourself, but the whole point of not reinventing a wheel is avoiding the maintenance on said wheel...

Re:Still broken

[znrt]

it's indeed not a language intended for code monkeys. feel free to move along. here, have a banana.

Re:Not that surprising

[dbrueck]

Try this: take a well-formatted C or Java program and remove all the curly braces, and try to objectively quantify how much this affects your ability to determine the program's structure. Now, take the same program and leave the curly braces but remove all the indentation and again make your best guess about how much this affects your ability to determine the program's structure.

Now ask yourself two questions:
1) Which of the two (indentation or curly braces) is the much stronger indicator of program structure to a human?
2) Which of the two is the much stronger indicator of program structure to the computer?

(hint: if you're completely honest, you'll almost certainly come up with different answers for #1 and #2 :) )

Doesn't it seem just a little weird that the primary indicator of program structure to the human isn't the one that actually matters from the computer's perspective? I'm not saying it's this massive problem, but at the same time it seems odd to fault a language like Python for taking the main block structure indicator from modern languages and have both the human and the computer rely on it. No redundancy, and no chance for two competing block structure indicators to ever be out of sync.

Again, if you want a language where curlies are required, that's fine, but hopefully you can at least see that what Python does is both sensical and pragmatic.

Re:A feature still missing

[Urkki]

The documentation is great in general, you seem to have found one missing link in a relatively obscure class. As a whole, Python's docs are great. They generally explain well and give full examples.

Just compare (not, these are not exactly same thing, just pretty close):

• Qt5 QFile [qt-project.org]
• Java6+ java.nio.channels.FileChannel [oracle.com]
• .NET FileStream [microsoft.com]
• Python 3 io module [python.org]

Of these, Python's is least clear and useful in my eyes, by quite a margin. YMMV.