5 ms·

I think there is way less "anti" python 3 attitude than there appears. A few haters, a few blog spam/click baiters, a few people who never even looked at pytho

I think there is way less "anti" python 3 attitude than there appears. A few haters, a few blog spam/click baiters, a few people who never even looked at python3. Vast majority of people using Python3 (me included), just use it. It's not a big deal. No reason to toot my horn over it. There is lots of FUD from early 3.0-3 days. Python 3.5 is solid and well supported by 3rd party libs check this out https://caniusepython3.com/ https://caniusepython3.com/ Python3 has been adopted, now. It just isn't newsworthy so we don't hear about it.

vegabook 11y ago
This is true and incomplete at the same time. It's true that 3 is happily happening for many people, effectively and without fuss. But it's incomplete to pretend the schism is not an issue; not to try to understand the pro-2.x points which many reasonable users have. Its a huge issue, even now, and to pretend it's not there is to do BOTH pythons a disservice because it will simply serve to feed the disagreement, to the detriment of both flavours of the language. The Python 3 project needs to understand where it went wrong, acknowledge it, 'better language' arguments (true-ish but largely ineffective) notwithstanding, and try to bridge the community. Yes the 3 segment reasonably wishes all this would just go away so we can all focus on moving python forward, but it's not going away. It must be adressed without yet another post about 3 being better, which simply makes 2.7 people feel like second class citizens. They've heard all the arguments before.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  > The Python 3 project needs to understand where it went wrong, acknowledge it... Already happened years ago. Breaking backward-compat is the issue, and is a difficult situation for any popular platform. Guido has mention it won't happen again.
Animats 11y ago
No, it hasn't, based on download stats of packages. Guido found this out the hard way when he went to work for Dropbox. They run mostly Python 2.7 code, and now he has to maintain it. Also, PyPy is 2.7 compatible, although there's a 3.x beta.
- macavity23 11y ago
  PyPy3 stable is compatible with Python 3. PyPy4 is not, yet.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Guido knew this long before going to DropBox. Google is still on 2.7. IIRC I saw some mailing list posts back around 2008 that acknowledged that most large organizations will never upgrade to 3.0, because it just doesn't make sense when you have a large legacy codebase. That doesn't make Python 3 a failure or unadopted, it's just the structure of our industry. By search & job stats [1], the most popular programming languages are Java, C, C++, C#, and yep, Python. Companies tend to pick whatever language is best for early adopters when they first get started and then language usage grows along with the company. So the most popular languages now are the ones that were cutting edge 15 years ago, when the biggest companies of today were tiny startups. Go look at what's most popular among startups today and you'll see what'll be the hot programming languages in 15 years. [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
  - digaozao 11y ago
    Nice metric to see if a language is going to be mainstream. I think this should work. Do you think of any way to validate your theory?
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      You can backtest it against languages that appear frequently in programming forums or Silicon Valley meetups and then take a look at their popularity & use by big companies 5 years later. I've done this anecdotally (i.e. not with a huge quantitative sample size, but looking at specific "hot" tech companies and the tech stacks they end up using) and it seems to work, but is subject to certain gotchas. Data points: EBay (1995) - Perl, rewritten in C++ in 1997, rewritten in Java in 2002. Google (1998) - C++. Del.icio.us (2003) - Perl. GMail (2002) - Perl, rewritten in Java circa 2002. LiveJournal (2002) - Perl. Flickr (2004) - PHP. Facebook (2004) - PHP. YouTube (2005) - Python. Reddit (2005) - Lisp, rewritten in Python in 2006. AirBnB (2006) - Ruby on Rails. GitHub (2007) - Ruby on Rails. Dropbox (2007) - Python. Hacker News (2007) - Arc, YC internal tools (c. 2012) are written in Ruby on Rails. Twitter (2007) - Ruby on Rails, rewritten 2010 in Java/Scala. Uber (2010) - Node.js, supposedly this was a rewrite. There are two big caveats: Sometimes a big competitor comes along right when a language is undergoing a massive rewrite - for example, it looked like Perl would own the Internet around 2003, but just a couple years later we got Rails and Django and Perl stagnated with Perl 6, and so Perl jobs are nowhere near as hot as they would otherwise be. Similarly, Python was poised to take over much of the non-web server space in 2008, but in 2009 Node.js came out just as Python was losing steam in the Python 3 transition. Python still remains pretty hot (it's been helped by its use in data science), but it may've lost the startup server market to Node. The other big anomaly is that there was a lot of attention around Haskell and Erlang from 2005 - 2008, and yet these are still niche languages. Erlang had one big success with Whatsapp and some smaller ones with Facebook chat and CouchDB, but didn't really become mainstream. My hypothesis there is that because both of these were old languages that were rediscovered, they were built with some assumptions (eg. strings are lists, or funky POSIX interfaces) that didn't fit modern startup development, and so they couldn't gain critical mass. But then, both Python and Ruby were old languages that were rediscovered; perhaps it was the sudden resurgence of Linux (which both Python and Ruby were steeped in) along with the web that carried them forwards.
fredrik-j 11y ago
While CPython 3.x is rock solid and shipped years ago - no argument there - both Pypy and Jython still lacks stable Python 3.x releases. That's a major migration pain point. It is hard trying to introduce Python 3 at a place that has systems that depend on both Cpython and Jython. Jumping between python 2 and 3 between projects is quite taxing mentally. And staying on python 2 only leaves me with a sense of lingering doom to say nothing of having to endure all the idiosyncrasies of python 2.x. I really enjoy the few moments when I can use Python 3. It is perhaps easy to consider the 2 vs 3 debate over and done with for people who can just disregard Pypy and Jython entirely in their environment. I probably would think so myself had I not been so unfortunate to be the unwilling maintainer of solutions dependent on Jython right now.
- sigzero 11y ago
  Jython has always been behind and sometimes by a large margin. I don't think that is a "major" migration point at all.
Semiapies 11y ago
I'm not sure how to even read this, after I give it the requirements file for my last Flask project. It says six projects block transition for me, then offers me a goofy badge saying 4 blockers. Over on the right, the top thirteen of the projects in my file are black and not given as links. (However, it is clear that going to Python 3 would not work.)

vegabook 11y ago

This is true and incomplete at the same time. It's true that 3 is happily happening for many people, effectively and without fuss. But it's incomplete to pretend the schism is not an issue; not to try to understand the pro-2.x points which many reasonable users have. Its a huge issue, even now, and to pretend it's not there is to do BOTH pythons a disservice because it will simply serve to feed the disagreement, to the detriment of both flavours of the language. The Python 3 project needs to understand where it went wrong, acknowledge it, 'better language' arguments (true-ish but largely ineffective) notwithstanding, and try to bridge the community. Yes the 3 segment reasonably wishes all this would just go away so we can all focus on moving python forward, but it's not going away. It must be adressed without yet another post about 3 being better, which simply makes 2.7 people feel like second class citizens. They've heard all the arguments before.

mixmastamyk 11y ago
> The Python 3 project needs to understand where it went wrong, acknowledge it... Already happened years ago. Breaking backward-compat is the issue, and is a difficult situation for any popular platform. Guido has mention it won't happen again.

Animats 11y ago

No, it hasn't, based on download stats of packages. Guido found this out the hard way when he went to work for Dropbox. They run mostly Python 2.7 code, and now he has to maintain it. Also, PyPy is 2.7 compatible, although there's a 3.x beta.

macavity23 11y ago
PyPy3 stable is compatible with Python 3. PyPy4 is not, yet.
nostrademons 11y ago
Guido knew this long before going to DropBox. Google is still on 2.7. IIRC I saw some mailing list posts back around 2008 that acknowledged that most large organizations will never upgrade to 3.0, because it just doesn't make sense when you have a large legacy codebase. That doesn't make Python 3 a failure or unadopted, it's just the structure of our industry. By search & job stats [1], the most popular programming languages are Java, C, C++, C#, and yep, Python. Companies tend to pick whatever language is best for early adopters when they first get started and then language usage grows along with the company. So the most popular languages now are the ones that were cutting edge 15 years ago, when the biggest companies of today were tiny startups. Go look at what's most popular among startups today and you'll see what'll be the hot programming languages in 15 years. [1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
- digaozao 11y ago
  Nice metric to see if a language is going to be mainstream. I think this should work. Do you think of any way to validate your theory?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    You can backtest it against languages that appear frequently in programming forums or Silicon Valley meetups and then take a look at their popularity & use by big companies 5 years later. I've done this anecdotally (i.e. not with a huge quantitative sample size, but looking at specific "hot" tech companies and the tech stacks they end up using) and it seems to work, but is subject to certain gotchas. Data points: EBay (1995) - Perl, rewritten in C++ in 1997, rewritten in Java in 2002. Google (1998) - C++. Del.icio.us (2003) - Perl. GMail (2002) - Perl, rewritten in Java circa 2002. LiveJournal (2002) - Perl. Flickr (2004) - PHP. Facebook (2004) - PHP. YouTube (2005) - Python. Reddit (2005) - Lisp, rewritten in Python in 2006. AirBnB (2006) - Ruby on Rails. GitHub (2007) - Ruby on Rails. Dropbox (2007) - Python. Hacker News (2007) - Arc, YC internal tools (c. 2012) are written in Ruby on Rails. Twitter (2007) - Ruby on Rails, rewritten 2010 in Java/Scala. Uber (2010) - Node.js, supposedly this was a rewrite. There are two big caveats: Sometimes a big competitor comes along right when a language is undergoing a massive rewrite - for example, it looked like Perl would own the Internet around 2003, but just a couple years later we got Rails and Django and Perl stagnated with Perl 6, and so Perl jobs are nowhere near as hot as they would otherwise be. Similarly, Python was poised to take over much of the non-web server space in 2008, but in 2009 Node.js came out just as Python was losing steam in the Python 3 transition. Python still remains pretty hot (it's been helped by its use in data science), but it may've lost the startup server market to Node. The other big anomaly is that there was a lot of attention around Haskell and Erlang from 2005 - 2008, and yet these are still niche languages. Erlang had one big success with Whatsapp and some smaller ones with Facebook chat and CouchDB, but didn't really become mainstream. My hypothesis there is that because both of these were old languages that were rediscovered, they were built with some assumptions (eg. strings are lists, or funky POSIX interfaces) that didn't fit modern startup development, and so they couldn't gain critical mass. But then, both Python and Ruby were old languages that were rediscovered; perhaps it was the sudden resurgence of Linux (which both Python and Ruby were steeped in) along with the web that carried them forwards.

fredrik-j 11y ago

While CPython 3.x is rock solid and shipped years ago - no argument there - both Pypy and Jython still lacks stable Python 3.x releases. That's a major migration pain point. It is hard trying to introduce Python 3 at a place that has systems that depend on both Cpython and Jython. Jumping between python 2 and 3 between projects is quite taxing mentally. And staying on python 2 only leaves me with a sense of lingering doom to say nothing of having to endure all the idiosyncrasies of python 2.x. I really enjoy the few moments when I can use Python 3. It is perhaps easy to consider the 2 vs 3 debate over and done with for people who can just disregard Pypy and Jython entirely in their environment. I probably would think so myself had I not been so unfortunate to be the unwilling maintainer of solutions dependent on Jython right now.

sigzero 11y ago
Jython has always been behind and sometimes by a large margin. I don't think that is a "major" migration point at all.

Semiapies 11y ago

I'm not sure how to even read this, after I give it the requirements file for my last Flask project. It says six projects block transition for me, then offers me a goofy badge saying 4 blockers. Over on the right, the top thirteen of the projects in my file are black and not given as links. (However, it is clear that going to Python 3 would not work.)