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.
These may be issues for smaller projects, but I don't feel that either visibility or community is a problem for a project like Python. They have the luxury of going wherever they want and people will follow.
This is a much needed counter-balance to Ian's post. While I can understand the technology reasons for moving away from Python, the community remains the most important reason for hanging on to it. I believe, which ever open source tool one chooses to use, the community should be one of most, if not the most, important criteria.
The problem with statements like these is people always move the goal posts. If challenged it goes from nobody to talking about the proportions. There are plenty of people who will use this straight away. Yes, maybe as a proportion but Python has a lot of users developing a lot of different types of applications. Even if initially it's a small proportion, it's not the absolute numbers are large. I guess some of the bellyaching is because there's a feeling that the community and ecosystem of libraries is becoming fragmented -- but the community is large enough to take it and anyone really needing a particular library should be capable of expending the effort to port it or find an alternative. There are plenty of users who don't engage with the community much and/or just use established libraries/the standard library anyway.
In conclusion, not everyone is in the same boat as you. Try and see beyond your own nose pleas.
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".
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.
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