5 ms·

I still don't understand what happened here historically, was there ever an upgrade path or way to make this a smooth transition? I can't think (surely there is

by tibbon 11y ago

I still don't understand what happened here historically, was there ever an upgrade path or way to make this a smooth transition? I can't think (surely there is) of another language that had such a hard-breaking version change that still persists 10 years later as a fracture across the community.

maxerickson 11y ago
It hasn't been 10 years. There were known IO performance regressions at the time 3.0 was released, nobody involved in releasing it would have said to use it in production right away. 3.1 was released ~6 years ago: https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.1/ https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.1/ (Even if the above is deemed BS, the release of 3.0 was 7 years ago) Many of the 3.0 features can be switched on in 2.7 and there were some attempts to automate as much of the code change as possible (but people ended up preferring to write code that runs on both 2.7 and 3.x, but I suppose that then is not really evidence of a fracture).
- saurik 11y ago
  I remember quite distinctly when the Python 3000 manifesto was released just under ten years ago, in April of 2006. That is when the line in the sand was drawn and the key mistakes were made that caused the "schism" in the community. What the Python community was screaming for was a fix for the GIL and the other performance issues in Python, not minor changes to Unicode handling that were maybe awkward but perfectly possible to get right in Python 2.6. Google seriously spent tons of effort at the time trying to remove that GIL. They were one of the biggest proponents of Python at the time, and frankly they were part of what made it so successful. With their work on Unladen Swallow not making meaningful progress and the Python core developers concentrating on Python 3000, making it clear that they don't even care, it isn't a wonder that Google was hedging their bets by hiring Rob Pike to work on Go, which many now see as most directly being a competitor to Python, and which has sapped a lot of people who would potentially be Python users. Meanwhile, the broken release of 3.0 needs to be blamed for part of the problem, not used as a reason to delay the historical date of fracture: a lot of things were broken in 3.0, including some basic things that Python got wrong in Unicode. The performance regressions were not quickly fixed, making people hesitant of the benefits of Python 3, and the Unicode issues (which were not fixed until years later, when they added the round-trip-safe Unicode conversions; but even this is a workaround, as filenames are defined to be strings of bytes by the filesystem) were ironic as the whole point of Python 3 was to somehow be better at dealing with Unicode :/. And you seem to be forgetting that the real problem was not the features added in 3.0 but the features taken away at the same time that made it impossible to write reasonable code that ran on both 2.7 and 3.0 even for extremely simple cases like "catches an exception". They only just a year or so ago have started to crack their party line of "shut up and upgrade to 3: it is better and you are wrong" and add some backwards compatibility features to 3.x, such as supporting the u prefix (which was the absolute dumbest thing they could have removed).
WorldMaker 11y ago
VB6 versus VB.NET is a worse historic pothole of a version change for arguably the same language. Ultimately the Python 2 -> 3 transition has been as smooth as developers make it. There are certainly a lot of transition efforts put in place, such as the ability to import from __future__ some of the 3 behaviors and abilities and some automated migration tools. At this point, too, most of the major libraries today support 3 and there's few reasons not to build for 3 and maybe do a few tweaks to also support 2, if you truly have to. (A lot of good 3 code runs on 2 unmodified and just needing the Python equivalent of polyfill libraries and __future__ imports.) Some of the fracture has been binary ABI compatibility and mini-versions of this struggle can certainly be seen in just about any language with an ecosystem of cross-platform native libraries to support (the brief Node/io.js being an interesting fracture more in that it was resolved so amicably so relatively quickly). But ultimately it's tough to resolve the psychological and political hurdles: for whatever reason there seem to be "die hard" Python 2 fanatics that hate the direction Python 3 has moved and don't seem interested at all in compromise or transition. It certainly doesn't seem to be as strong as the hate divide between VB6 and VB.NET (which will likely forever be a weird blood feud until VBA and VB6 programmers die of old age), but still haters are gonna hate.
brbsix 11y ago
There is a library (and script) called 2to3 that automates code translation from Python 2 to 3. I wouldn't rely on it for my own projects, but I have seen a number of authors use it successfully (e.g. write their app in Python 2 and tell users it is compatible with automatic translation). If you're on 2.7.x, you can certainly import in quite of the newer features. There are also some resources for writing 2/3 compatible code, such as the six library and http://python-future.org/ http://python-future.org/. It is no problem for fairly trivial applications, but I don't envy anyone who has to ensure 2/3 compat for a large project.
- kansface 11y ago
  Floobits was forced to write python 6 ... or 2/3 ... for our Sublime Plugin. The python3 experience has been awful enough to completely dissuade me from using python for any other project. Completely breaking backwards compatibility for small features no one cares about was a complete disaster as evidenced by half? of the community still using 2.7.
  - collinmanderson 11y ago
    6% were 3.x in April 2014 https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/ https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - collinmanderson 11y ago
      (sorry, April 2015, not 2014)
yellowstuff 11y ago
Perl 6 started 15 years ago. Perl was the workhorse of the early web, when I was a young programmer interested in the web it seemed like the most worthwhile language I could learn. Perl isn't dead but it's lost most of its appeal, and a large part of that is due to the failed development on Perl 6.
- crusso 11y ago
  Yeah, but that's not really the same as what has happened in the Python community where Python 3 has been available for so long but there's still resistance to making the shift. Perl 6 still isn't available.
  - eeZi 11y ago
    All of the professional Python devs I personally know laugh at people who voluntarily stick with Python 2.
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    Perl6 is very much available, right now: http://perl6.org/ http://perl6.org/
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      Incomplete implementations of Perl 6 that are identified as pre-final releases are available right now (and have been for some time), but that's different from a general release. A "complete" release is planned for this Christmas; its a very different situation than Python 3, which has had stable releases for several years, including several feature releases after the first stable release.
      - labster 11y ago
        I don't think it's fair to characterize Rakudo Perl 6 as incomplete, at least on the MoarVM backend. It is very nearly complete, with the bulk of the semantics fixed in years past. It is currently passing 122627 tests[1]. If you write code today, it will probably not break by December. I guess it still counts as unstable software, but I used Gmail beta for half a decade and that turned out fine. At this point, its a matter of nomenclature, because I've certainly used buggier "final release" software. [1]: https://github.com/coke/perl6-roast-data/commit/2aeeb87edc https://github.com/coke/perl6-roast-data/commit/2aeeb87edc
mangecoeur 11y ago
The transition has been pretty smooth, but quite slow. Nearly all the major libraries are update - IMHO if a library doesn't support Python 3 these day's it's probably unmaintained and should be avoided. There's plenty of support for transitioning smoothly especially with a handful of changes in 3.2 and 3.3 to make this even easier. I think there are however a small number of very vocal people who didn't like the change, and their posts tend to linger...

by tibbon 11y ago

maxerickson 11y ago

It hasn't been 10 years. There were known IO performance regressions at the time 3.0 was released, nobody involved in releasing it would have said to use it in production right away. 3.1 was released ~6 years ago: https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.1/ https://www.python.org/download/releases/3.1/ (Even if the above is deemed BS, the release of 3.0 was 7 years ago) Many of the 3.0 features can be switched on in 2.7 and there were some attempts to automate as much of the code change as possible (but people ended up preferring to write code that runs on both 2.7 and 3.x, but I suppose that then is not really evidence of a fracture).

saurik 11y ago
I remember quite distinctly when the Python 3000 manifesto was released just under ten years ago, in April of 2006. That is when the line in the sand was drawn and the key mistakes were made that caused the "schism" in the community. What the Python community was screaming for was a fix for the GIL and the other performance issues in Python, not minor changes to Unicode handling that were maybe awkward but perfectly possible to get right in Python 2.6. Google seriously spent tons of effort at the time trying to remove that GIL. They were one of the biggest proponents of Python at the time, and frankly they were part of what made it so successful. With their work on Unladen Swallow not making meaningful progress and the Python core developers concentrating on Python 3000, making it clear that they don't even care, it isn't a wonder that Google was hedging their bets by hiring Rob Pike to work on Go, which many now see as most directly being a competitor to Python, and which has sapped a lot of people who would potentially be Python users. Meanwhile, the broken release of 3.0 needs to be blamed for part of the problem, not used as a reason to delay the historical date of fracture: a lot of things were broken in 3.0, including some basic things that Python got wrong in Unicode. The performance regressions were not quickly fixed, making people hesitant of the benefits of Python 3, and the Unicode issues (which were not fixed until years later, when they added the round-trip-safe Unicode conversions; but even this is a workaround, as filenames are defined to be strings of bytes by the filesystem) were ironic as the whole point of Python 3 was to somehow be better at dealing with Unicode :/. And you seem to be forgetting that the real problem was not the features added in 3.0 but the features taken away at the same time that made it impossible to write reasonable code that ran on both 2.7 and 3.0 even for extremely simple cases like "catches an exception". They only just a year or so ago have started to crack their party line of "shut up and upgrade to 3: it is better and you are wrong" and add some backwards compatibility features to 3.x, such as supporting the u prefix (which was the absolute dumbest thing they could have removed).

WorldMaker 11y ago

VB6 versus VB.NET is a worse historic pothole of a version change for arguably the same language. Ultimately the Python 2 -> 3 transition has been as smooth as developers make it. There are certainly a lot of transition efforts put in place, such as the ability to import from __future__ some of the 3 behaviors and abilities and some automated migration tools. At this point, too, most of the major libraries today support 3 and there's few reasons not to build for 3 and maybe do a few tweaks to also support 2, if you truly have to. (A lot of good 3 code runs on 2 unmodified and just needing the Python equivalent of polyfill libraries and __future__ imports.) Some of the fracture has been binary ABI compatibility and mini-versions of this struggle can certainly be seen in just about any language with an ecosystem of cross-platform native libraries to support (the brief Node/io.js being an interesting fracture more in that it was resolved so amicably so relatively quickly). But ultimately it's tough to resolve the psychological and political hurdles: for whatever reason there seem to be "die hard" Python 2 fanatics that hate the direction Python 3 has moved and don't seem interested at all in compromise or transition. It certainly doesn't seem to be as strong as the hate divide between VB6 and VB.NET (which will likely forever be a weird blood feud until VBA and VB6 programmers die of old age), but still haters are gonna hate.

brbsix 11y ago

There is a library (and script) called 2to3 that automates code translation from Python 2 to 3. I wouldn't rely on it for my own projects, but I have seen a number of authors use it successfully (e.g. write their app in Python 2 and tell users it is compatible with automatic translation). If you're on 2.7.x, you can certainly import in quite of the newer features. There are also some resources for writing 2/3 compatible code, such as the six library and http://python-future.org/ http://python-future.org/. It is no problem for fairly trivial applications, but I don't envy anyone who has to ensure 2/3 compat for a large project.

kansface 11y ago
Floobits was forced to write python 6 ... or 2/3 ... for our Sublime Plugin. The python3 experience has been awful enough to completely dissuade me from using python for any other project. Completely breaking backwards compatibility for small features no one cares about was a complete disaster as evidenced by half? of the community still using 2.7.
- collinmanderson 11y ago
  6% were 3.x in April 2014 https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/ https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - collinmanderson 11y ago
    (sorry, April 2015, not 2014)

yellowstuff 11y ago

Perl 6 started 15 years ago. Perl was the workhorse of the early web, when I was a young programmer interested in the web it seemed like the most worthwhile language I could learn. Perl isn't dead but it's lost most of its appeal, and a large part of that is due to the failed development on Perl 6.

crusso 11y ago
Yeah, but that's not really the same as what has happened in the Python community where Python 3 has been available for so long but there's still resistance to making the shift. Perl 6 still isn't available.
- eeZi 11y ago
  All of the professional Python devs I personally know laugh at people who voluntarily stick with Python 2.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Perl6 is very much available, right now: http://perl6.org/ http://perl6.org/
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Incomplete implementations of Perl 6 that are identified as pre-final releases are available right now (and have been for some time), but that's different from a general release. A "complete" release is planned for this Christmas; its a very different situation than Python 3, which has had stable releases for several years, including several feature releases after the first stable release.
    - labster 11y ago
      I don't think it's fair to characterize Rakudo Perl 6 as incomplete, at least on the MoarVM backend. It is very nearly complete, with the bulk of the semantics fixed in years past. It is currently passing 122627 tests[1]. If you write code today, it will probably not break by December. I guess it still counts as unstable software, but I used Gmail beta for half a decade and that turned out fine. At this point, its a matter of nomenclature, because I've certainly used buggier "final release" software. [1]: https://github.com/coke/perl6-roast-data/commit/2aeeb87edc https://github.com/coke/perl6-roast-data/commit/2aeeb87edc

mangecoeur 11y ago

The transition has been pretty smooth, but quite slow. Nearly all the major libraries are update - IMHO if a library doesn't support Python 3 these day's it's probably unmaintained and should be avoided. There's plenty of support for transitioning smoothly especially with a handful of changes in 3.2 and 3.3 to make this even easier. I think there are however a small number of very vocal people who didn't like the change, and their posts tend to linger...