This is a good article, of interest to people even outside web dev in the python community. I did not know that python 3.1 was that much slower than python 2.x (python 3.0 was, but this was well known from everyone).
His point about writing new python 2 code for easy 2to3 application is a good one: porting existing projects to python 3 is quite difficult, because it cannot always be done without breaking API, but writing new code which can be easily ported is much easier. There still needs better support to easily use 2to3 and test its output in an automated fashion.
I am also delighted to see known python hackers to recognize the lack of python 3 usage, and that maybe the roadmap needs to be somehow modified.
The roadmap has already changed, BTW. At some point, the plan was to have python 2.x such as to convert so that python 2.x will be very close to python 3, plan which was abandoned AFAIK (I can certainly understand why, though, since it would have required a lot of non-fun work).
Comments
This is a good article, of interest to people even outside web dev in the python community. I did not know that python 3.1 was that much slower than python 2.x (python 3.0 was, but this was well known from everyone).
His point about writing new python 2 code for easy 2to3 application is a good one: porting existing projects to python 3 is quite difficult, because it cannot always be done without breaking API, but writing new code which can be easily ported is much easier. There still needs better support to easily use 2to3 and test its output in an automated fashion.
I am also delighted to see known python hackers to recognize the lack of python 3 usage, and that maybe the roadmap needs to be somehow modified.
The roadmap doesn't need to be modified. The roadmap has always been "the transition will take five years."
Where are you taking this five years number ?
The roadmap has already changed, BTW. At some point, the plan was to have python 2.x such as to convert so that python 2.x will be very close to python 3, plan which was abandoned AFAIK (I can certainly understand why, though, since it would have required a lot of non-fun work).