git/list[1] front-page[2] threads[3] people[4] search[5] about
 

Re: Python extension commands in git - request for policy change

From
Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
Date
Nov 25, 2012, 10:25 UTC
Message-ID
<20121125102536.GC22279@thyrsus.com>
In-Reply-To
<50B1DD78.5040907@kdbg.org>
Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>:
Show 7 quoted lines
> Am 25.11.2012 03:44, schrieb Eric S. Raymond:
> > That, among other things, means up-to-date versions of Python are
> > ubiquitous unless we're looking at Windows - in which case Perl and
> > shell actually become much bigger portability problems.
> 
> You seem to ignore that more than a quater of users are on Windows[1].
> This is not negligible.
I'm not ignoring that at all.  There are questions of fact here:

Are Perl and a POSIX shell part of the stock installation of Windows? I believe the answer is "no". You are free to correct me, but if that's true they don't have any obvious portability advantage over Python. That means the 25% percent of Windows users are not actually a reason to prefer them.

> Absolutely not. To achieve best portability, all code should move to C
> instead.

I wrote the (first) book on C portability. I mean that literally - "Portable C and Unix Systems Programming", Prentice-Hall 1987. Please don't feel insulted when I point out that over the last 25 years I have probably forgotten more about this topic than you know. Just listen when I tell you that it is not at all obvious that raw C is the maximally portable language.

It may very well be the case that some random scripting language (not necessarily Python) achieves greater portability simply because its maintainers get to pay more concentrated attention to the portability of the environment bindings at the bottom of their C implementation than we can.

In any case, I don't believe the difference in portability between raw C and Python is large enough in either direction to be a reason to favor either, and I speak as a domain expert on this issue. This is not Python advocacy talking; the same could be said of Perl or Ruby.

The real advantages of a scripting language are in maintainability and expected defect rates, not portability. The three relevant things we kbnow from large-scale studies of software defect patterns are these:

1) Expected defect counts are predictable from LOC.
2) Moving to any given scripting language from C dramatically reduces LOC,
and thus expected defects over time.
3) Moving to any scripting language from C eliminates a class of
memory-management problems that dominate C defect statistics.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>
Previous: Johannes SixtNext: Krzysztof Mazur
Message 77 of 82 in “Python extension commands in git - request for policy change”
  1. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  2. Nguyen Thai Ngoc DuyNov 25, 2012
  3. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  4. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  5. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  6. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  7. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  8. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  9. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  10. Felipe ContrerasNov 26, 2012
  11. David AguilarNov 27, 2012
  12. Felipe ContrerasNov 27, 2012
  13. Sitaram ChamartyNov 27, 2012
  14. David AguilarNov 27, 2012
  15. Guillaume DE BURENov 27, 2012
  16. Johannes SchindelinNov 27, 2012
  17. Felipe ContrerasNov 28, 2012
  18. Johannes SchindelinNov 25, 2012
  19. Pat ThoytsNov 25, 2012
  20. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  21. Erik Faye-LundNov 25, 2012
  22. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  23. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  24. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  25. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  26. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  27. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  28. Andreas EricssonNov 26, 2012
  29. Michael HaggertyNov 25, 2012
  30. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  31. David LangNov 25, 2012
  32. Stefano LattariniNov 25, 2012
  33. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  34. Nguyen Thai Ngoc DuyNov 25, 2012
  35. Patrick DonnellyDec 11, 2012
  36. Sitaram ChamartyDec 12, 2012
  37. Patrick DonnellyDec 12, 2012
  38. Tomas CarneckyDec 12, 2012
  39. Nguyen Thai Ngoc DuyDec 12, 2012
  40. Tomas CarneckyDec 12, 2012
  41. Patrick DonnellyDec 12, 2012
  42. Joshua JensenDec 12, 2012
  43. Eric S. RaymondDec 12, 2012
  44. Joshua JensenDec 12, 2012
  45. Eric S. RaymondDec 12, 2012
  46. Jeff KingDec 12, 2012
  47. Patrick DonnellyDec 12, 2012
  48. Jeff KingDec 12, 2012
  49. Eric S. RaymondDec 12, 2012
  50. Jeff KingDec 12, 2012
  51. Junio C HamanoDec 12, 2012
  52. Andrew ArdillDec 12, 2012
  53. Junio C HamanoDec 12, 2012
  54. Patrick DonnellyDec 12, 2012
  55. Eric S. RaymondDec 12, 2012
  56. Patrick DonnellyDec 19, 2012
  57. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  58. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  59. Felipe ContrerasNov 25, 2012
  60. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  61. Felipe ContrerasNov 26, 2012
  62. Magnus BäckNov 27, 2012
  63. Eric S. RaymondNov 27, 2012
  64. Sitaram ChamartyNov 27, 2012
  65. Felipe ContrerasNov 28, 2012
  66. Philippe VaucherDec 3, 2012
  67. Felipe ContrerasDec 4, 2012
  68. Stephen BashDec 4, 2012
  69. Felipe ContrerasNov 28, 2012
  70. Jeff KingNov 28, 2012
  71. Felipe ContrerasNov 28, 2012
  72. Jeff KingNov 28, 2012
  73. Felipe ContrerasNov 28, 2012
  74. Magnus BäckNov 28, 2012
  75. Joshua JensenNov 28, 2012
  76. Johannes SixtNov 25, 2012
  77. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  78. Krzysztof MazurNov 25, 2012
  79. Eric S. RaymondNov 25, 2012
  80. Sitaram ChamartyNov 26, 2012
  81. Krzysztof MazurNov 26, 2012
  82. Martin LanghoffDec 4, 2012

Read the whole thread, see it on lore, or plain text.

$ cat FOOTERMessages come from the public archive at lore.kernel.org/git, fetched every hour. The front page is chosen and written each morning by an AI editor and can be wrong; the threads themselves are the record. About and API. For agents: an MCP server at https://gitlist.dev/mcp, and any thread, story or person page as Markdown by adding .md to its URL (or sending Accept: text/markdown). Details in /llms.txt.