About 18 months ago I taught myself the Python programming language over the course of a few weeks, and was impressed with it from the start. Version 3 has just come out, and is generating a lot of interest, as this post illustrates. The new version takes the language forward in its purity and structure as a general purpose object-oriented language, that you can pretty much do anything with. A word of caution though: as this article at the Register points out, the new version will break some code written in previous versions, so it’s not simply a case of downloading it and starting to use it.
This is an example of something that remains a challenge for software developers everywhere: how to deal with the latest version / patch / upgrade of a core product that you’re using. Whether it’s a new version of Python, migrating from Microsoft Content Management to Sharepoint or even just applying a big service pack, these things take time and need proper planning. In a commercial organisation with all the pressures of project delivery, that tends to suffer, often for much too long.
Basically, most clients aren’t interested (and quite reasonably so) in the need to upgrade from Service Pack 1 to Service Pack 2, and in a commercially competitive environment that can be problematic. Long-term bugs can turn out to be caused by old versions of things, new functionality can be harder to deliver, the long-term efficiency of an organisation can suffer enormously.
What’s the answer? Top-down, companies need to budget a certain amount of their time if they do technology seriously for maintenance and business as usual, and then plan for that work to happen ongoing. It can’t be allowed to be permanently de-railed because of client pressures, because ultimately the client pressures will only get worse, developers will get fractious at having to work with old versions of things, and so it’ll end up costing more. The tricky part is getting the right budget and plan for the business as usual work, one that’s commercially acceptable and gets the short-term / long-term balance right.
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