You state software that nobody is using might disappear. Obviously nobody cares about software that nobody uses. I’m worried about the software that is being used, but by non-programmers. Even if there are developers using it the investment in porting the software may higher than people are willing to pay for either in time or money. I don’t see how we can see this even partly as a good thing. At most you can say it’s “not as bad as it sounds”, or something like that.

I think it is better to be aware that we’re going to be in for a rough ride for a while than to breezily say migration isn’t going to much of and issue and that we don’t need to be scared.

I’m not saying the sky is falling. But it’s not true either that the sky is blue, the birds are whistling. Those are storm clouds on the horizon, and it’s going to rain. We better take our umbrellas and be prepared for a wet summer.

No need to be scared! This has been coming for a while now. I suppose there’s a risk that some software will disappear, but only if nobody is using it. Maybe we could see that as at least partly a good thing?

Thanks for the comments. I was not just referring to you with regard to the segregation of developers. I agree wholly that they are a special group and their responsibilities to the larger community. The issue I wanted to raise was that I saw many comments which put the core developers up in some ivory tower as if they were not effected by the changes they were inflicting on the rest of us. That is what I found odd and felt needed correcting.

There perspective is very different from that of the Zope, Django, SciPy, Jython, PyPY, twisted, or ipython groups. It is very different from the cheeze shop package maintainers. It is very different from those just learning python. We all need to work together to identify the problems Py3K will cause which the core developers, with their different perspective, have not identified. That was my point.

There is defiantly a heightened risk to projects which are poorly written and have no test frameworks (like the PyCon-Tech stuff… *cough*) Maybe this will give them incentive to write tests? If not, are the packages worth bringing forward? I have no Idea. That is the part that scares me the most.

I suspect that you are referring to some of my comments as segmenting the language developers from the wider community. I realize that the language developers are a special part of the wider community and have their own code to port. That they do so is good.

But let’s not forget that they are also a special group – they (and ultimately Guido) control the language implementation, and their decisions have repercussions throughout the community of the users of the language, which is untrue for other groups within the Python community. This great power means great responsibility, and moreover, they need great patience.

How else are the language developers special during this phase of transition? Language developers tend to be good enough programmers to have a good test coverage for their own code. They will also be very aware of issues that come up during porting code and will be better able to port code than the average Python programmer. Their Python code will likely also be more clean and well-structured than the average Python code base, further increasing the ease of porting. Language developers are also likely more interested in and excited by the prospect of language evolution than is usual. Their perspective and culture will therefore be naturally somewhat different than that of other groups within the wider Python community.

What I realize I should be careful about is confusing individual language developer’s statements as speaking for the whole group. Then again, I suspect this will be how many people will interprete their statements anyway, so they should be careful too.