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.
The Python ecosystem in general is severely underfunded despite all big players using it extensively.
I think one reason is that the community is doing too good of a job. The language is pretty sane, it solves most problems right, the libs and docs are good, and the general direction thinks take is reasonable. And it's free not only as beer and freedom, but also free from business influences. The PSF is really giving away pretty much everything.
Everybody contribues a little (we have the brett canon team from ms, the guido team from dropbox, the alexi martelli team from google, mozilla even donated for pypy, etc). But it's nothing massive. Nobody said "ok here is 10 millions euros, solve the packaging problem".
Compare to JS: the language started as slow, with terrible design, and no consensus on the direction to take. So eventually, people (Google first) pourred a load of money to it until it became usable, and they had a cleaner leadership. They had huge problem to solve on the ever expending market that is the web plateform. Of course JS as the unfair advantage of a captive audience and total monopoly on its field.
But at the same time you hear people complaining they yet can't migrate to Python 3 because they have millions of lines of Python. You hear of them when they want to extend the support for free, but never to support the community.
It's ridiculous.
Also compare to PHP: the creators made a business out of it, plain and simple.
Compare to Java/C#/Go: it's owned by huge players that have a lot of money engaged.
Python really needs a sugar daddy so that we can tackle the few items remaining on the list:
- integrated steps to make an exe/rpm/deb/.app
- JIT that works everywhere
- mobile dev
- multi-core with fast and safe memory sharing
There are projects for that (nuikta, pyjion, kivi, etc), but they all lack of human power, money and hence integration, perfs, features, etc.
You need a simple way to code some GUI, make it work on mobile or desktop, turn it into and exe and distribute it.
You need a simple way to say "this is a long running process, JIT the hell out of it".
The Python ecosystem in general is severely underfunded despite all big players using it extensively, which makes it really unfair if you compare it to the money poured into JS because of its monopoly on the web.
But at the same time you hear people complaining they yet can't migrate to Python 3 because they have millions of lines of Python. You hear of them when they want to extend the support for free, but never to support the community.
It's ridiculous.
Python needs a sugar daddy. It's used in Mac and Linux. It's used at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nasa and so many more.
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.
Well, in 2008 the PSF had a budget of $500k for the entire world. To compare with JS, this is the order of magnitude of the salary of one single person working on google chrome.
The community didn't have a lot of resources for a long time, and so had to prioritize: it chose to focus on python strenghts, and not compensate for weaknesses. It couldn't do both. Keeping the implementation simple was also a way to keep the project manageable on the cheap (and by cheap in mean in work hours, since the first 15 years, most core devs were just doing it for free).
Today, a lot of companies with a lot of money have much to gain to invest in python, and so we can finally have our cake and eat it too.
Because PSF says they will support Python? What happens when there is a bug? You fork Python? PSF gets 3 million in revenue per year. Where do you think the money goes? Python is not a hobby project.
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.
I always proposed that the way forward is training, consulting, and speciality services. I’ve seen this model work so much better than most, and for languages seems more obvious (I’m less sure how to handle the problem for packages in an ecosystem that also deserve funding)
I always wondered why that wasn’t the PSF model (having a business arm that provides these things to fund development and other initiatives like putting together conferences)
With Python in particular I’ve heard first hand from people who I have no reason to believe wouldn’t pay for what they’re saying: specific language features or enhancements. It’s impossible to donate directly to the PSF or otherwise for it be a line item for that specific purpose though, and I think in Pythons case it has hurt their ability to raise funds, maybe
I'm pretty surprised that you can't get some funding from Canonical, Redhat, Microsoft, SuSE, Linux Foundation, et al. Is there anyone on the team who could engage those organizations?
Several linux distros have much of their customization features written in python.
Microsoft seems to be trying VERY hard to change their course and attract more developers back to their platform(s). They're clearly willing to make strategic investments in open source projects.
I've found that PyPy works wonders for the vast majority of python code I've thrown at it. In order to close remaining gaps, funding is key.
Unfortunately, it's not something I have answers to. I guess I just look at the success of something like the Micro Python campaign [0] (also a cool project) and wonder if something similar could be achieved.
There are plenty of companies that could benefit from PyPy doing well though. How many python servers do youtube / reddit etc run? With some investment in PyPy they could reduce their on-going costs. Youtube could easily dump $100k into the PyPy project, so what's stopping them? (I suspect the answer in that case is that Google just aren't interested)
I'm in a startup that doesn't have money to invest in PyPy, but if we we had more cash we'd definitely look at putting some into PyPy (though our use case is the hairy NumPy side of things).
I guess in the case of PyPy it's maybe less interesting to individuals but maybe there's some way of reframing it to make it interesting.
In a way, I'm sort of the target market here, because I use python all the time and I haven't donated to PyPy. So why haven't I donated (other than being quite broke because I'm starting a business)?
I think part of it is the urgency. There are 3 specific campaigns you're running [1] to get funding, along with funding for the general project itself. And the campaigns themselves are great - you have good overviews of the issues that you're solving, a realistic approach and a proven track record of being able to execute. But I don't know when those campaigns started and what the cut-off date is. They sort of feel ongoing and it feels like there's no loss in not donating right now. Compare with something like kickstarter, where you have a date by which if there hasn't been enough funding you may end up losing out on something really cool.
Sorry for the rather rambling brain-dump, but maybe there's some useful perspective here.
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...
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.
reply