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Python 3 is a seriously misguided project. It's got tons of newer-to-Python fans (your HN downvoter demographic), and tons of silent-majority "real-world" users

Python 3 is a seriously misguided project. It's got tons of newer-to-Python fans (your HN downvoter demographic), and tons of silent-majority "real-world" users especially in scientific programming who just don't like it. I moved to 3.4 a year ago and, as a data scientist, I have to say I find nothing in 3 to be better than 2, other than the extremely marginal default float arithmetic. I may be wrong for web development etc with asyncio whatever, but for me all I get from 3 is Unicode and xrange cruft that simply complicates my code for zero benefit. Personally am hoping that something new emerges that will take over from Python altogether as the default in data science, or that some big entity will sponsor a fork of 2.7 to shutdown this ridiculous "eol" dictatorship.

viraptor 10y ago
So what you're saying is that Python 3 changed some small stuff that you see no benefits in, but moved a year ago, and you're now on Py 3.4. And because of that small no-benefit update, you want to move to completely different language that will start with: no scientific libraries, no community, and will likely require rewrite of everything you work with? Where's the benefit in doing that?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vegabook 10y ago
  the benefit is that all the wasted energy that went into all the useless 3.x stuff, could have been spent on advancing Python's speed, multicore, or GPU programming capabilities. Instead, for the single use case where Python is clearly the dominant language (for pure network-effect reasons), namely scientific programming, we have been at a standstill for years. In other words, under current stewardship, Python is going down a path where I don't see a long term future for it in my domain, and therefore, I am looking elsewhere already. I am also almost 100% certain that if scientific programmers leave Python, the language will stall, and the current 3.x pushers are dangerously looking a gift horse in the mouth. This is particularly true given that Go is rapidly eating Python's lunch in all non-science use cases.
  - jaipilot747 10y ago
    For me Python 3 is worth it just for the time I no longer have to waste in fighting Unicode errors. Obviously, YMMV.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      This. Not having to deal with “UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte” at random places and times is a godsend.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    > I am also almost 100% certain that if scientific programmers leave Python, the language will stall, and the current 3.x pushers are dangerously looking a gift horse in the mouth. This sounds like such similar sour grapes to the systemd escapades. Huge initial outroar as certain things happened, followed by a gradual diminishing, then [mostly] acceptance. This is what is happening with Python 3 and a smaller, doom-and-gloom subset of the userbase. Most of us are thankful that Python is striving to improve, and that we continue to pay nothing to use it. The alarmists are far more noisy than those that are happily continuing to build stuff. Python will remain massively used in the sciences. It's simple, easy to learn, expressive, and has an excellent ecosystem of modules (which now mostly work on Python 3).
    - vegabook 10y ago
      Except that personally I see the benefit of Systemd every time I boot my linux computer. It just works, fast, and clean. I don't partake in the philosophical arguments. I just want it to work. Py3 by contrast, simply throws cruft curveballs at me. No tangible benefit. This is not a systemd-style issue. And yes Python will likely continue massively to be used in the sciences, 3 bears like me notwithstanding, so it would be good if the current stewards would actually recognize the fact that this is their core base of users and please could they focus on them instead of the web people who are much more fickle and moving already.
      - gtaylor 10y ago
gtaylor 10y ago
I'm not seeing signs of these kinds of widespread issues out in the wild. The popularity of the language has continued to increase, and numerous warts and flaws were wiped out in Python 3. That Unicode "cruft" is especially appreciated by the rest of the world that exists outside of the US. Python 2's approach to bytes and encoding is naive and horrible for 2017.
- Radim 10y ago
  I'll bite. I'm outside of the US and Python 2 has worked wonderfully for ages. Its unicode support is good. You work with strings as unicode, then at I/O boundaries (and exceptions) you convert to bytes. What specifically do you find "naive and horrible" about its bytes and encodings? Python 3 can use less memory for unicode strings (a cool optimization introduced in py3.3, IIRC), and it did away with the "narrow/wide build" distinction (same release). That's about the only every-day advantage I can think of. But I suspect that's too technical, or do you mean that?
  - toyg 10y ago
    This has been explained over and over. Those boundaries in python2 are very easy to get wrong and the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know about them until some crap data comes down the wire and code chokes or (worse) silently corrupts data. In py3 you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible. It shouldn't take 8 years to understand this issue, and I'm positive you do understand it because you're an intelligent person, so please don't troll about it.
    - Radim 10y ago
      "With dynamic typing, the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know until some crap data comes and your code chokes. With static typing, you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible." See what I did there? toyg, I found your comment unbearably rude, condescending and arrogant, and downvoted it for that reason.
mrweasel 10y ago
To me, unicode alone was worth the switch. I will go to great length to avoid the hell that is unicode in Python 2. Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release. I get that there was a series of data science libraries that wasn't supported initially, but seems to have been solved at this point. So I really do see why people continue to hate Python 3. I'm not going to argue that the transition couldn't have been handled more smoothly, the period of broken libraries and terrible performance was a little too long.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release. That's because you start "new projects". Some of us have 10+ years of codebases to maintain, and we don't care for Python 3 features...
  - mrweasel 10y ago
    If you don't care about the Python 3 features, then don't migrate. I suspect that the issue is that you want at least some of the features, but the cost of moving 10+ years of Python 2 to Python 3 just aren't worth the benefits of those new features. While I do believe that your point is still valid, one also have to accept that Python 2 will be a legacy platform at some point. In the long run I don't view that as much different than people complaining about Visual Basic 6 being deprecated.
  - bmh100 10y ago
    Python 3.0 was released in 2008. Python 2 will EOL in 2020. You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL. A 12-year upgrade window sounds pretty reasonable.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL. Most of those years library support was non-existent or lacking. And still today the majority uses Python 2.x (Pypi stats). So it's not like the migration was some great success since the start, and all those years were just wasted by some minority not migrating. In the end, it's not a discussion on HN or what the "BDFL" says about an official EOL that will settle the matter, but actual adoption in the field. But in addition to the low adoption rate, we've even seen people leave Python for Go and Node/JS.
MatthewWilkes 10y ago
For what it's worth, as someone who ha been working with Python for 11 years, Python 3 is a huge improvement over Python 2 and is certainly very popular with my peers. The fact that you personally weren't particularly affected by the problems in 2 doesn't mean the problems weren't serious.
- vegabook 10y ago
  and the converse applies.
dang 10y ago
> It's got tons of newer-to-Python fans (your HN downvoter demographic) Please don't make generalizations about people who disagree with you just to score a rhetorical point, and please don't break the HN guidelines by going on about downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- vegabook 10y ago
  This particular subject invites heavy bias due to vote herding, and I am proud to call it out and to speak an unpopular but fair opinion nonetheless. http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwik19fM_M7RAhWsJMAKHdc0CTkQFggeMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tau.ac.il%2F~nogaa%2FPDFS%2Fherding.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHo83Vv6O_LosgddXJHgOfteTkbMg http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEw... As a moderator you appear guilty of partisanship because I note a conspicuous absence of action against a clear mob suppression of the 2.7 view.

viraptor 10y ago

So what you're saying is that Python 3 changed some small stuff that you see no benefits in, but moved a year ago, and you're now on Py 3.4. And because of that small no-benefit update, you want to move to completely different language that will start with: no scientific libraries, no community, and will likely require rewrite of everything you work with? Where's the benefit in doing that?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vegabook 10y ago
the benefit is that all the wasted energy that went into all the useless 3.x stuff, could have been spent on advancing Python's speed, multicore, or GPU programming capabilities. Instead, for the single use case where Python is clearly the dominant language (for pure network-effect reasons), namely scientific programming, we have been at a standstill for years. In other words, under current stewardship, Python is going down a path where I don't see a long term future for it in my domain, and therefore, I am looking elsewhere already. I am also almost 100% certain that if scientific programmers leave Python, the language will stall, and the current 3.x pushers are dangerously looking a gift horse in the mouth. This is particularly true given that Go is rapidly eating Python's lunch in all non-science use cases.
- jaipilot747 10y ago
  For me Python 3 is worth it just for the time I no longer have to waste in fighting Unicode errors. Obviously, YMMV.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    This. Not having to deal with “UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte” at random places and times is a godsend.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  > I am also almost 100% certain that if scientific programmers leave Python, the language will stall, and the current 3.x pushers are dangerously looking a gift horse in the mouth. This sounds like such similar sour grapes to the systemd escapades. Huge initial outroar as certain things happened, followed by a gradual diminishing, then [mostly] acceptance. This is what is happening with Python 3 and a smaller, doom-and-gloom subset of the userbase. Most of us are thankful that Python is striving to improve, and that we continue to pay nothing to use it. The alarmists are far more noisy than those that are happily continuing to build stuff. Python will remain massively used in the sciences. It's simple, easy to learn, expressive, and has an excellent ecosystem of modules (which now mostly work on Python 3).
  - vegabook 10y ago
    Except that personally I see the benefit of Systemd every time I boot my linux computer. It just works, fast, and clean. I don't partake in the philosophical arguments. I just want it to work. Py3 by contrast, simply throws cruft curveballs at me. No tangible benefit. This is not a systemd-style issue. And yes Python will likely continue massively to be used in the sciences, 3 bears like me notwithstanding, so it would be good if the current stewards would actually recognize the fact that this is their core base of users and please could they focus on them instead of the web people who are much more fickle and moving already.
    - gtaylor 10y ago

gtaylor 10y ago

I'm not seeing signs of these kinds of widespread issues out in the wild. The popularity of the language has continued to increase, and numerous warts and flaws were wiped out in Python 3. That Unicode "cruft" is especially appreciated by the rest of the world that exists outside of the US. Python 2's approach to bytes and encoding is naive and horrible for 2017.

Radim 10y ago
I'll bite. I'm outside of the US and Python 2 has worked wonderfully for ages. Its unicode support is good. You work with strings as unicode, then at I/O boundaries (and exceptions) you convert to bytes. What specifically do you find "naive and horrible" about its bytes and encodings? Python 3 can use less memory for unicode strings (a cool optimization introduced in py3.3, IIRC), and it did away with the "narrow/wide build" distinction (same release). That's about the only every-day advantage I can think of. But I suspect that's too technical, or do you mean that?
- toyg 10y ago
  This has been explained over and over. Those boundaries in python2 are very easy to get wrong and the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know about them until some crap data comes down the wire and code chokes or (worse) silently corrupts data. In py3 you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible. It shouldn't take 8 years to understand this issue, and I'm positive you do understand it because you're an intelligent person, so please don't troll about it.
  - Radim 10y ago
    "With dynamic typing, the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know until some crap data comes and your code chokes. With static typing, you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible." See what I did there? toyg, I found your comment unbearably rude, condescending and arrogant, and downvoted it for that reason.

mrweasel 10y ago

To me, unicode alone was worth the switch. I will go to great length to avoid the hell that is unicode in Python 2. Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release. I get that there was a series of data science libraries that wasn't supported initially, but seems to have been solved at this point. So I really do see why people continue to hate Python 3. I'm not going to argue that the transition couldn't have been handled more smoothly, the period of broken libraries and terrible performance was a little too long.

coldtea 10y ago
>Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release. That's because you start "new projects". Some of us have 10+ years of codebases to maintain, and we don't care for Python 3 features...
- mrweasel 10y ago
  If you don't care about the Python 3 features, then don't migrate. I suspect that the issue is that you want at least some of the features, but the cost of moving 10+ years of Python 2 to Python 3 just aren't worth the benefits of those new features. While I do believe that your point is still valid, one also have to accept that Python 2 will be a legacy platform at some point. In the long run I don't view that as much different than people complaining about Visual Basic 6 being deprecated.
- bmh100 10y ago
  Python 3.0 was released in 2008. Python 2 will EOL in 2020. You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL. A 12-year upgrade window sounds pretty reasonable.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL. Most of those years library support was non-existent or lacking. And still today the majority uses Python 2.x (Pypi stats). So it's not like the migration was some great success since the start, and all those years were just wasted by some minority not migrating. In the end, it's not a discussion on HN or what the "BDFL" says about an official EOL that will settle the matter, but actual adoption in the field. But in addition to the low adoption rate, we've even seen people leave Python for Go and Node/JS.

MatthewWilkes 10y ago

For what it's worth, as someone who ha been working with Python for 11 years, Python 3 is a huge improvement over Python 2 and is certainly very popular with my peers. The fact that you personally weren't particularly affected by the problems in 2 doesn't mean the problems weren't serious.

vegabook 10y ago
and the converse applies.

dang 10y ago

> It's got tons of newer-to-Python fans (your HN downvoter demographic) Please don't make generalizations about people who disagree with you just to score a rhetorical point, and please don't break the HN guidelines by going on about downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

vegabook 10y ago
This particular subject invites heavy bias due to vote herding, and I am proud to call it out and to speak an unpopular but fair opinion nonetheless. http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwik19fM_M7RAhWsJMAKHdc0CTkQFggeMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.tau.ac.il%2F~nogaa%2FPDFS%2Fherding.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHo83Vv6O_LosgddXJHgOfteTkbMg http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEw... As a moderator you appear guilty of partisanship because I note a conspicuous absence of action against a clear mob suppression of the 2.7 view.