After thinking about it and doing some experiments, here are my recommendations according "the future of SPOJ and Python":
First some facts:
- Psyco is dead. Beyond Python 2.6 there is no psyco anymore.
- Pypy is alive, the latest stable version (1.9) is compatible with Python 2.7, and development is going on.
- Pypy is much faster than pure CPython, speed is comparable to Python + psyco.
- SPOJ offeres two different Python-Versions for some time, now (> 2 years, if I remember right)
- The Python 3.1 installation has no problems, works stable
- The Python 2.5 installation (now labeled as Python 2.7, but in fact still Python 2.5) makes some trouble from time to time.
Then my recommendations:
- Python 3.x should be maintained - of course. From time to time it should be updated as you can expect some improvements (speeding up e.g.). Newbies mostly will learn Python 3.x nowadays and thus can use SPOJ as a playground.
- The Python 2.x branch should also be maintained, but the standard CPython should be replaced by pypy. What are the reasons for that recommendation:
- "Older Pythonistas" are familiar with Python 2.x and prefer Python 2.x over Python 3.x.
- Python is a great language, but speed doesn't belong to its strengths. So there are many SPOJ problems that are impossible to solve with standard CPython, some others require special optimizations to speed up and some even need hard optimizations and the use of psyco to get AC, even though it may be algorithmically easy ones that can be implemenented straight forward in a faster language to get AC. So, the use of pypy will be an important contribution to have Python as a competitive language among the languages offered by SPOJ. It will reduce the need of special optimizations and reduce the time working on those things - instead the algorithm and its proper implementation will be in the focus.
I hope that some other Python users share my view and that the admins can be convinced to go that way.