The Python mailing list currently has just over 100 members, and is
growing slowly (but surely), so I don't think there is yet a
compelling reason for creating a newsgroup.
My personal hope is that posting 1.0 to comp.sources.unix (or .misc)
will boost the number of users by a large factor and then we'll have
to reconsider this. I wish I could do more on publicity, e.g. put
papers in conferences (USENIX being an obvious candidate) or write a
book about Python, but the grim reality is that my research topics for
the next few years are something completely different so it isn't
likely that my employer will pay for my time writing a book about
Python, nor for traveling to a conference to talk about it.
I also have some vague ideas to promote Python as a multimedia
prototyping language (since that what it is being used for most
successfully here at CWI), but this will again depend on finding the
spare time to complete, unify, generalize and document the stuff we
are currently using internally (some, but not all, of which is part of
the Python release).
Anybody else?
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>