Friday, December 5, 2008

Thoughts on Python 3.0

Python 3.0 has been released. I first used Python at either the end of 1999 or the beginning of 2000. It's with some surprise that I find myself rather ambivalent about what is a major landmark for a tool that I've used on a near-daily basis for almost nine years.

There are a variety of reasons for my ambivalence. Largely, my own programming interests have diverged from the main features of Python. Thus, the significant changes that are present in Python 3 just aren't addressing the shortcomings of Python that affect me. In particular,
  • My interest in functional programming has continually increased since I first learned about it in 2002. Python is pretty limited in its support for functional programming, especially in its inability to do tail call optimization and its lack of suitable data structures.
  • Learning about functional programming led me to Standard ML and its kin. Reading Harper's Standard ML book profoundly affected how I think about programming, perhaps even more than did reading SICP. Much to my surprise, I found that static typing didn't have to be the nightmare I remembered from C programming. Indeed, typeful programming turns out to be a natural match for how I like to work, with types encoding—and enforcing—a great deal of the assumptions that go into function definition. Python, with its untyped variables, doesn't lend much support to this style.
  • Concurrency appears increasingly relevant. I'd like to learn more about concurrent programming, and apply it in practice. Specifically, message passing concurrency shows great promise, interacting well with a functional programming style and providing ready control over when nondeterminism appears (see, e.g., a recent post on Lambda the Ultimate). Python isn't structured for the approach I want to explore.
Basically, there are things that I want to do that Python just gets in the way of, and the future of Python seems quite unlikely to include the changes I need.

In light of the above, the landmark Python 3 release comes across as a good time to re-assess how I use Python. As a whole, I'm left thinking that I'd be better off directing more of my time to Scala, OCaml, or Haskell. The changes in Python 3 hardly seem worth even the relatively minor effort needed to upgrade at this point, so I think I'll just stick with the installation I have for now.

2 comments:

Alex Miller said...

You should take a look at Clojure too.

Michael Barber said...

Thanks for the tip. I've seen Clojure mentioned before, but not thought much about it. Looking over the Clojure website, it seems to offer more of interest than just a Lisp on the JVM. I am leaning towards statically typed languages, but will definitely have to read more about Clojure.