Sun, 09 Jul 2006

Python loses the plot

In Python’s early days, I saw it as a fine addition to the programmer’s toolkit—it seemed to offer the good things that Perl offered, but without the gruesome syntax and other Perl perversions, and the Python benevolent dictator and community seemed to have a good plan for the future.

As a result, I began developing most new large applications in Python, with the occasional bit of heavy lifting in C as needed. This approach worked well for some years. But then the wheels slowly started falling off—and yesterday’s experience has pushed me to the point where I’ve decided not to use Python for any new development. This leaves me with a dilemma, of course, as I don’t have any suitable candidate for a replacement.

So what’s my beef? In a nutshell, it’s gratuitous changes that break code that was once correct when it’s exposed to a newer Python release. This disease has afflicted Python for some time, although I have been lucky enough to have only been bitten once before. Yesterday was my second experience with this kind of breakage and I’m going to make it my last.

For those who care, the behaviour of time.strftime() changed in Python-2.4 in a really silly manner. I have a module that asks the user for a date and then parses the elements of the provided date to ensure that we in fact have a valid day, month and year. I then used time.strftime() to format it in a specific manner. Because I only had 3 of the possible 9 elements of the argument passed to this function, I had been using what used to be the documented values as place holders. As of Python-2.4, that is suddenly no good.

Clearly, I can work around this. But then they’ll break some other standard function that I’ve been using and I’ll have to work around something else. And so on. There is no legitimate excuse for this kind of arbitrary change. It’s impossible to code in such a way that you won’t be bitten, and there’s too much new software coming out every day for developers to have the time to waste reading all the fine print just in case some idiot has broken some standard API.

My interim solution is to change the first line of all my scripts from #!/usr/bin/env python to #!/usr/bin/env python2.3 and, in the longer term, I’ll find a suitable alternative language to work with. I’m certainly finished with Python.

Posted at: 16:50

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