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Has a massive big change like that ever worked smoothly in a language with really widespread use? I mean it's 8 years later and python is still feeling the iss

Has a massive big change like that ever worked smoothly in a language with really widespread use? I mean it's 8 years later and python is still feeling the issues from the 2->3 change.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
Only because they didn't deprecate 2 soon enough, they could have forced peoples hand, we would all have complained but it would be long forgotten by now.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I don't believe that. I understand that some of the issue is lazy developers, but I really think that the majority of the problems would be caused by unmaintained code. Websites frequently sit around un-touched for years, hell our company website has some js code that was written by me over 4 years ago and hasn't been touched since because there's just no need to screw with it. And i'll be honest, it's not going to get updated until something breaks, and I would consider myself someone who likes to be on the cutting edge and is willing to endure breaking changes in more things than i should. I really think that by advocating for a "good" subset of the language, we can get all of the benefits of removing old stuff with very little of the downsides. Something like "use strict"; in javascript now. It removed many terrible things from the language in a way that you could mix old and new code together and get the benefits of both. That worked great, and i really think it could work great again. Something like a "use es6" or something that removes a massive set of "bad ideas" in the language, but it does it in a per-file or per-function basis. Allowing new code to be written in a better way, and allows old code to keep going as it was for a very long time.
  - kurttheviking 11y ago
    As someone who dealt extensively with piles of legacy Python 2.7 code, I can wholeheartedly agree with this. If the "forced" 2-3 change would have occurred right away, I am certain my employer (at the time) would have forked Python itself.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > they could have forced peoples hand, we would all have complained but it would be long forgotten by now. Had they been forced, a significant portion of users would have thought long and hard and jumped ship to a different language altogether, and Python "would be long forgotten by now".

Has a massive big change like that ever worked smoothly in a language with really widespread use? I mean it's 8 years later and python is still feeling the issues from the 2->3 change.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago

Only because they didn't deprecate 2 soon enough, they could have forced peoples hand, we would all have complained but it would be long forgotten by now.

Klathmon 11y ago
I don't believe that. I understand that some of the issue is lazy developers, but I really think that the majority of the problems would be caused by unmaintained code. Websites frequently sit around un-touched for years, hell our company website has some js code that was written by me over 4 years ago and hasn't been touched since because there's just no need to screw with it. And i'll be honest, it's not going to get updated until something breaks, and I would consider myself someone who likes to be on the cutting edge and is willing to endure breaking changes in more things than i should. I really think that by advocating for a "good" subset of the language, we can get all of the benefits of removing old stuff with very little of the downsides. Something like "use strict"; in javascript now. It removed many terrible things from the language in a way that you could mix old and new code together and get the benefits of both. That worked great, and i really think it could work great again. Something like a "use es6" or something that removes a massive set of "bad ideas" in the language, but it does it in a per-file or per-function basis. Allowing new code to be written in a better way, and allows old code to keep going as it was for a very long time.
- kurttheviking 11y ago
  As someone who dealt extensively with piles of legacy Python 2.7 code, I can wholeheartedly agree with this. If the "forced" 2-3 change would have occurred right away, I am certain my employer (at the time) would have forked Python itself.
sangnoir 11y ago
> they could have forced peoples hand, we would all have complained but it would be long forgotten by now. Had they been forced, a significant portion of users would have thought long and hard and jumped ship to a different language altogether, and Python "would be long forgotten by now".