15 ms·

New IPython release drops Python 2.7 support

214 points by peterdemin 9y ago

makmanalp 9y ago
The 5.x fixed a lot of my UX quibbles with the completion menu, and made syntax highlighting, and now they're further improving the completion quality and the menu. I'm so excited!
- sandebert 9y ago
  And you just can't hide it.
  - echion 9y ago
    Speaking of UX and hiding, you can hide the menu bar, so you don't have to lose control unless you like it: echo "jQuery('#header-container').hide();" >> ~/.jupyter/custom/custom.js
    - krick 9y ago
      Wow, that's awesome. Didn't know I can do custom tweaking with Jupyter.
      - mynewtb 9y ago
        It's YOUR browser, for heaven's sake!
  - hyperbovine 9y ago
    It's a shame that humorous comments are so consistently downvoted here. Are we all supposed to be post-laughter now or something?
    - pekk 9y ago
      Low-content jokes never did particularly well on HN. Like it or loathe it, it's been a cultural feature here for years.
      - hyperbovine 9y ago
        I don't remember it being this bad maybe ~8 years ago.
    - lsh 9y ago
      yeah, the HN commenter majority are stuffy and humourless but quick on the downvote. just leave them to their playground.
      - matt4077 9y ago
        It has nothing to do with that. The fear is not what's added, but what's removed. Experience tells us that jokes will quickly dominate the top of threads, leading to a loss for serious comments. Sure, there's enough room for as many comments as you like in a thread, but only the top x actually get read, usually. FWIW, I thought the comment was pretty funny, and the first answer was even better.
- lerax 9y ago
  And now they are removing obsolete piece of software like Py2.7. Pretty awesome! We have almost twenty years of Python2 software, the day of not looking more to back is coming for python community.
- carreau 9y ago
  You are welcome. We hope to have more contribution and bring you more awesomeness. Already installing Jedi-dev will make things faster and complete more edge cases !
bjt2n3904 9y ago
It'd be really nice if they followed python3, and named it ipython3. This is just going to confuse install processes if I now have to install "ipython<6".
- oliwarner 9y ago
  It's unnecessary. You don't need to jump through those hoops. Pip can handle all sorts of requirements including Python version, OS, etc. pip install ipython currently grabs ipython-5.3.0 on Python 2.7.
  - takluyver 9y ago
    It does! But make sure to update pip itself (pip install --upgrade pip), because it only does the right thing as of pip 9.0. Some of the IPython team actually worked on the infrastructure (pip & pypi) to make this possible, to minimise the pain for installing on Python 2.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  This recommendation should really be updated IMO. `python3` will never see full adoption as long as `python` is reserved for Python 2. I understand the need as a compatibility thing, but at some point the forward-looking cost of distinguishing `python3` exceeds the legacy cost of applications that just say `python` when they mean `python2`.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    The best option (in my opinion) would be to add a simple way on the first line of a python file to express the language. Then 'python' can read the file, and execute it under the right language. The problem is if we ever switch 'python' to 'python3', then there will be 5 or so years when 'python' becomes unusable, as you won't know on a given machine if it's python2 or python3, and almost no program works on both.
    - takluyver 9y ago
af3 9y ago
Waiting for a Python 2 fork...
breatheoften 9y ago
A comment from a beginner python user -- but I need to rant ... I've been doing a bit of python the last few weeks for some image processing/computer vision tasks (using opencv and numpy). I have to say, all together it's a pretty miserable developer experience. Python is incredibly slow - forcing pretty much all computation no matter how trivial into contortions via numpy incantations so that the inner loops can run in native extensions -- these Incantations have a lot of implicit not well documented magic. Miss some details in the behavior of the magic and suddenly you have a major 10x slowdown -- but good luck finding where. I would kill for an easy to use tool like xcodes Time Profiler ... API usage errors (even those where invariants are checked at runtime) are ridiculously under informative -- opencv for example does quite a bit of runtime sanity checking on the shape and type of arguments to its methods -- but somehow even simple details as to which parameter is the cause of the error don't get reported in the stack trace severely increasing the cognitive load required to identify the mismatch -- not fun when multiple arguments to an API are the result of a chain of numpy magic data munging. This may be an opencv complaint more than python (aside: opencv is pretty terrible.) I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with python but I find the majority of my code to be sort of menial data munging -- and I haven't figured out good patterns to organize this munging in any sensical way --with a static language d.r.y patterns to centralize such plumbing operations have the awesome effect of moving invariants into reasonable places -- in python without any ability to organjze guarantees, as the code base evolves I find myself needing to repeatedly check data shapes/types -- there doesn't seem to be an obviously useful way to organize verification of data types as the necessary invariants become apparent. These issues are compounded by the fact that refactoring is an enormous pain in the ass! I feel like all my python code is throwaway code. Maybe that's what I'm missing -- I need to just accept that all the python numeric code I write is pure one-off junk, embrace copy paste and never try to reuse any of it ... Sorry for the rant! I remember loving dynamic languages when I first discovered them - but right now, I really miss c++ (or even better swift). I can't imagine the number of hours wasted because of these overly dynamic tools -- and there is simply no decreasing that lost time in the future -- as these languages grow if the house of cards ecosystems they sit atop grow and motivates more use then ever more developer hours will be lost to avoidable triviality ...
- goatlover 9y ago
zitterbewegung 9y ago
I use Juypter and the iPython nearly every day. The new autocomplete looks extremely promising. If you are running Python 2.7 it may not be a big deal to just use iPython 5.x though. The two major uses I have are prototyping nearly any coding project that requires python and teaching myself data analysis. This has saved me hours if not days due to the fact that the feedback loop is so fast. When I code in other languages I desire the iPython interface.
- jzymbaluk 9y ago
  >When I code in other languages I desire the iPython interface. It's not specifically IPython, but Jupyter does support many other languages through kernels! https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels
- carreau 9y ago
  Also instead of linking to the doc you might want to read the announce blog post: http://blog.jupyter.org/2017/04/19/release-of-ipython-6-0/ http://blog.jupyter.org/2017/04/19/release-of-ipython-6-0/
Chris2048 9y ago
I personally think they should have just declared Python 3 to be a new language, inspired by python 2, like many other competing new-pythons. Instead, they didn't play fair, and gave themselves an unfair advantage.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Damn that Python team, giving themselves an unfair advantage in developing Python. Seriously, what am I reading here?
  - krick 9y ago
    Maybe this is a joke, and then I'd say it's pretty neat one. I mean, just look at that, what other language got a similar problem of that scale! And let's not pretend it all passed and we are happily moving forward: this year (this month, actually) I've seen very prominent NN-course, suggesting Python 2.7 for all assignments and code samples, and quite useful library (also NN-related), supporting 2.7 only. I guess, some of mitsuhiko's (Ronarcher's) developments didn't move to 3.* as well. So, yeah, IPython dropping 2.7 is pretty huge. Almost like moving to a different language.
    - jerryszczerry 9y ago
      > I've seen very prominent NN-course, suggesting Python 2.7 for all assignments and code samples, and quite useful library (also NN-related), supporting 2.7 only. Oh, that's plain silly. Isn't the whole point of Python 2.7 to facilitate the transition to Python 3?
      - krick 9y ago
        Silly or not, but it's still very common mindset with scientific-oriented people (who care about ML, econometrics, statistics and such much more than "programming" per se), who form a quite notable category of Python users. Actually, for me they are the reason why I'm still using Python a lot (although I try to stick to 3.x), because for other use-cases, like scripting or web-dev I mostly (but not completely) moved to other languages.
gcr 9y ago
I understand the notebook machinery itself is running on Python 3, but can I still launch a Python 2.7 kernel? I am still working with Python 2-only libraries at the moment.
- goerz 9y ago
  Yes you can. Kernels are completely independent from the notebook itself.
708145_ 9y ago
Wow, I thought that this would never happen.

214 points by peterdemin 9y ago

The 5.x fixed a lot of my UX quibbles with the completion menu, and made syntax highlighting, and now they're further improving the completion quality and the menu. I'm so excited!

sandebert 9y ago
And you just can't hide it.
- echion 9y ago
  Speaking of UX and hiding, you can hide the menu bar, so you don't have to lose control unless you like it: echo "jQuery('#header-container').hide();" >> ~/.jupyter/custom/custom.js
  - krick 9y ago
    Wow, that's awesome. Didn't know I can do custom tweaking with Jupyter.
    - mynewtb 9y ago
      It's YOUR browser, for heaven's sake!
- hyperbovine 9y ago
  It's a shame that humorous comments are so consistently downvoted here. Are we all supposed to be post-laughter now or something?
  - pekk 9y ago
    Low-content jokes never did particularly well on HN. Like it or loathe it, it's been a cultural feature here for years.
    - hyperbovine 9y ago
      I don't remember it being this bad maybe ~8 years ago.
  - lsh 9y ago
    yeah, the HN commenter majority are stuffy and humourless but quick on the downvote. just leave them to their playground.
    - matt4077 9y ago
      It has nothing to do with that. The fear is not what's added, but what's removed. Experience tells us that jokes will quickly dominate the top of threads, leading to a loss for serious comments. Sure, there's enough room for as many comments as you like in a thread, but only the top x actually get read, usually. FWIW, I thought the comment was pretty funny, and the first answer was even better.
lerax 9y ago
And now they are removing obsolete piece of software like Py2.7. Pretty awesome! We have almost twenty years of Python2 software, the day of not looking more to back is coming for python community.
carreau 9y ago
You are welcome. We hope to have more contribution and bring you more awesomeness. Already installing Jedi-dev will make things faster and complete more edge cases !

bjt2n3904 9y ago

It'd be really nice if they followed python3, and named it ipython3. This is just going to confuse install processes if I now have to install "ipython<6".

oliwarner 9y ago
It's unnecessary. You don't need to jump through those hoops. Pip can handle all sorts of requirements including Python version, OS, etc. pip install ipython currently grabs ipython-5.3.0 on Python 2.7.
- takluyver 9y ago
  It does! But make sure to update pip itself (pip install --upgrade pip), because it only does the right thing as of pip 9.0. Some of the IPython team actually worked on the infrastructure (pip & pypi) to make this possible, to minimise the pain for installing on Python 2.
cookiecaper 9y ago
This recommendation should really be updated IMO. `python3` will never see full adoption as long as `python` is reserved for Python 2. I understand the need as a compatibility thing, but at some point the forward-looking cost of distinguishing `python3` exceeds the legacy cost of applications that just say `python` when they mean `python2`.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  The best option (in my opinion) would be to add a simple way on the first line of a python file to express the language. Then 'python' can read the file, and execute it under the right language. The problem is if we ever switch 'python' to 'python3', then there will be 5 or so years when 'python' becomes unusable, as you won't know on a given machine if it's python2 or python3, and almost no program works on both.
  - takluyver 9y ago

af3 9y ago

Waiting for a Python 2 fork...

breatheoften 9y ago

A comment from a beginner python user -- but I need to rant ... I've been doing a bit of python the last few weeks for some image processing/computer vision tasks (using opencv and numpy). I have to say, all together it's a pretty miserable developer experience. Python is incredibly slow - forcing pretty much all computation no matter how trivial into contortions via numpy incantations so that the inner loops can run in native extensions -- these Incantations have a lot of implicit not well documented magic. Miss some details in the behavior of the magic and suddenly you have a major 10x slowdown -- but good luck finding where. I would kill for an easy to use tool like xcodes Time Profiler ... API usage errors (even those where invariants are checked at runtime) are ridiculously under informative -- opencv for example does quite a bit of runtime sanity checking on the shape and type of arguments to its methods -- but somehow even simple details as to which parameter is the cause of the error don't get reported in the stack trace severely increasing the cognitive load required to identify the mismatch -- not fun when multiple arguments to an API are the result of a chain of numpy magic data munging. This may be an opencv complaint more than python (aside: opencv is pretty terrible.) I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong with python but I find the majority of my code to be sort of menial data munging -- and I haven't figured out good patterns to organize this munging in any sensical way --with a static language d.r.y patterns to centralize such plumbing operations have the awesome effect of moving invariants into reasonable places -- in python without any ability to organjze guarantees, as the code base evolves I find myself needing to repeatedly check data shapes/types -- there doesn't seem to be an obviously useful way to organize verification of data types as the necessary invariants become apparent. These issues are compounded by the fact that refactoring is an enormous pain in the ass! I feel like all my python code is throwaway code. Maybe that's what I'm missing -- I need to just accept that all the python numeric code I write is pure one-off junk, embrace copy paste and never try to reuse any of it ... Sorry for the rant! I remember loving dynamic languages when I first discovered them - but right now, I really miss c++ (or even better swift). I can't imagine the number of hours wasted because of these overly dynamic tools -- and there is simply no decreasing that lost time in the future -- as these languages grow if the house of cards ecosystems they sit atop grow and motivates more use then ever more developer hours will be lost to avoidable triviality ...

goatlover 9y ago

zitterbewegung 9y ago

I use Juypter and the iPython nearly every day. The new autocomplete looks extremely promising. If you are running Python 2.7 it may not be a big deal to just use iPython 5.x though. The two major uses I have are prototyping nearly any coding project that requires python and teaching myself data analysis. This has saved me hours if not days due to the fact that the feedback loop is so fast. When I code in other languages I desire the iPython interface.

jzymbaluk 9y ago
>When I code in other languages I desire the iPython interface. It's not specifically IPython, but Jupyter does support many other languages through kernels! https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels
carreau 9y ago
Also instead of linking to the doc you might want to read the announce blog post: http://blog.jupyter.org/2017/04/19/release-of-ipython-6-0/ http://blog.jupyter.org/2017/04/19/release-of-ipython-6-0/

Chris2048 9y ago

I personally think they should have just declared Python 3 to be a new language, inspired by python 2, like many other competing new-pythons. Instead, they didn't play fair, and gave themselves an unfair advantage.

scrollaway 9y ago
Damn that Python team, giving themselves an unfair advantage in developing Python. Seriously, what am I reading here?
- krick 9y ago
  Maybe this is a joke, and then I'd say it's pretty neat one. I mean, just look at that, what other language got a similar problem of that scale! And let's not pretend it all passed and we are happily moving forward: this year (this month, actually) I've seen very prominent NN-course, suggesting Python 2.7 for all assignments and code samples, and quite useful library (also NN-related), supporting 2.7 only. I guess, some of mitsuhiko's (Ronarcher's) developments didn't move to 3.* as well. So, yeah, IPython dropping 2.7 is pretty huge. Almost like moving to a different language.
  - jerryszczerry 9y ago
    > I've seen very prominent NN-course, suggesting Python 2.7 for all assignments and code samples, and quite useful library (also NN-related), supporting 2.7 only. Oh, that's plain silly. Isn't the whole point of Python 2.7 to facilitate the transition to Python 3?
    - krick 9y ago
      Silly or not, but it's still very common mindset with scientific-oriented people (who care about ML, econometrics, statistics and such much more than "programming" per se), who form a quite notable category of Python users. Actually, for me they are the reason why I'm still using Python a lot (although I try to stick to 3.x), because for other use-cases, like scripting or web-dev I mostly (but not completely) moved to other languages.

gcr 9y ago

I understand the notebook machinery itself is running on Python 3, but can I still launch a Python 2.7 kernel? I am still working with Python 2-only libraries at the moment.

goerz 9y ago
Yes you can. Kernels are completely independent from the notebook itself.

708145_ 9y ago

Wow, I thought that this would never happen.