It is not the job of application developers to keep up a languages "momentum", its the language creator's job. If he underestimated the momentum of the current version and didnt bother to inter-coordinate incompatible language upgrades with his users and introduced a new trademark-diluting version anyway, you cant simply blame the users for not investing time and money in order to "protect the language". They are not obliged to follow whereever he leads, and if he wants to lead without caring about his followers, they might just decide not to follow any more. Who guarantees that he's not going to pull a Python3 again 5 years down the road and then sing the same "not updating is momentum killing" song again?
I think it's pretty unfair to call this situation Guido's fault. Python 3 was developed with a significant amount of feedback from the community, and it was in development for years before being released. At multiple points in the process, Guido listened to feedback and conceded; one instance that comes to mind is Guido wanting to drop lambda, map(), and filter().
No one is obliged to do anything, least of all application developers, and I wasn't talking about them at all. I was wondering about the motivation of library and framework maintainers. It wasn't my perception that the process leading up to Python 3 was anything like the kind of language creator ego trip you describe. It was a longish collective process and it has since been made very clear that further language changes are not in the cards any time soon.
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> This is killing Python's momentum in my view.
It is not the job of application developers to keep up a languages "momentum", its the language creator's job. If he underestimated the momentum of the current version and didnt bother to inter-coordinate incompatible language upgrades with his users and introduced a new trademark-diluting version anyway, you cant simply blame the users for not investing time and money in order to "protect the language". They are not obliged to follow whereever he leads, and if he wants to lead without caring about his followers, they might just decide not to follow any more. Who guarantees that he's not going to pull a Python3 again 5 years down the road and then sing the same "not updating is momentum killing" song again?
I think it's pretty unfair to call this situation Guido's fault. Python 3 was developed with a significant amount of feedback from the community, and it was in development for years before being released. At multiple points in the process, Guido listened to feedback and conceded; one instance that comes to mind is Guido wanting to drop lambda, map(), and filter().
No one is obliged to do anything, least of all application developers, and I wasn't talking about them at all. I was wondering about the motivation of library and framework maintainers. It wasn't my perception that the process leading up to Python 3 was anything like the kind of language creator ego trip you describe. It was a longish collective process and it has since been made very clear that further language changes are not in the cards any time soon.