That's not completely true. It would be trivial to find people to work on Python 3 support if they were paid. It's just finding the volunteers that's hard.
More important than the number is that the foundation actually pays the core developers. Python suffers from having almost exclusively volunteer work and those volunteers often are not interested in solving the problems of the foundation or community (eg: packaging etc.).
The most the PSF could do is “bolt on” a developer to solve packaging in yet another non embraced and supported way.
Much of the popularity of Python is based upon third party libraries that have been contributed by both individuals and organizations. These are still contributions, and there are many cases where the contributors are paid.
Should Python receive more funding and pay more people to work on the language? Probably, yet it is doubtful that having a large team working on the core language will improve the health of the language.
You bring up a good point. It bothers me a great deal that companies aren't actively supporting the software that they depend on. The Python Foundation will take your donations. A thousand dollars a year is peanuts and the dividends are huge.
The thing is basically all major Python projects are volunteer based.
I think even the PSF has no full-time staff. Django has 1 person working full time on it.
It's so embarrassing, though honestly I'm doing nothing but complaining about it. While some might argue that it's OK for major frameworks to be like this because they're very stable already, the package manager is a big deal!
Perhaps if someone ran private repos off the same tech for enterprises, and used some of the proceeds to pay somebody to maintain the underlying tech (CircleCI model, basically...)
It's a matter of resources. I donated, and I invite everyone earning money with Python to do the same (http://pypy.org/py3donate.html).
More generally, the Python community really lacks money compared to other ones. GO, PHP and JS all have bigs players spending a lot of cash on it. While some companies does invest in Python, they don't spend nearly the same amount on it, and the PSF has a very tigh budget.
One of the reason is that Python is "good enough", and so people don't invest on it because they don't need more from it. While JS was so slow that Google spent millions to create the V8. It's sad, but being clean and robust and strongly community driven leads to a lack of funding for Python. I wish we had a Mark shuttlework for the language.
Google paying for approximately 1 developer isn’t going to change that the vast majority of Python work is done by volunteers who the PSF isn’t in a position to direct, no.
I think this is where paid support comes into picture. Volenteers can keep improving Python, business that cant/wont upgrade can pay someone to "handle it", and consultants can make money. Everyone is happy.
That's a pretty distorted view IMHO. There are a lot of people that are working in the Python ecosystem and improve the language, and while they are not directly paid by the PSF their employers give them time to devote to working on Python. I think e.g. GvR had plenty of freedom to work on his Python projects while at Dropbox. I know a lot of companies in Germany that give people ample time to go to Python conferences and engage with the community, as it's also a way to meet and recruit good Python developers.
So it might be true that there are only a few FTEs working on Python, but the larger community of people contributing to it is much larger.
Its such a statement about the free rider problem that python can have only 2 people working fulltime on it. Python is one of the most popular languages in the world - there's got to be trillions of dollars worth of companies depending on it. Small improvements to the language would result in millions of dollars of productivity gains in aggregate globally.
And yet ... collectively we can only find enough money to pay two full time salaries?! Seriously?
Big companies aren't going to gamble their future without support. And they probably don't want to deal with a single guy they find on the Internet for security/bug fixes in a forked version of Python.
Having Python experts on staff is no indication that those people have time to work on additional Python projects. And if there is a real talent shortage, it is quite likely they cannot find anyone else to take on the extra projects.
Ultimately, you are right that it is a business decision. They could hire anyone off the street and train them to be skilled in Python. Though I understand why they might not want to do that.
As if money would magically make hard things happen :)
Seriously, what if Python is specially hard to support for some reason? I feel if it was in the easy-to-medium-hard space, there would be a Slime port to Python, and if there isn't, its because its probably hard...
Contact Google. I'd venture that the chances of support are not low. Not only do they have the mentality, they also had Guido van Rossum, python's inventor and head developer, employed for years. And they are certainly well-known 8)
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