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The change to string handling justifies it for me. Writing `u’foo’` everywhere is a pain, and the rest of the 2.7 model is extraordinarily prone to runtime erro

by brians 9y ago

The change to string handling justifies it for me. Writing `u’foo’` everywhere is a pain, and the rest of the 2.7 model is extraordinarily prone to runtime errors. With 3.6, I don’t have those problems.

pc2g4d 9y ago
Yeah, I was pretty much sold on Python 3 when I stopped having to use the `codecs` module to read my files and when it would strictly enforce the separation between `bytes` and `str`, rather than having to manually track what sort of sequence I was dealing with.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  Yes, yes. My Python life is mostly about impelemnting odd protocols with Twisted. Will probably get serious about asyncio soon, but I have a lot of historical Twisted to deal with ATM. I've noticed that the "Who cares about Python 3" types are not the people working on the kinds of problems I am. So my conclussion is that for many kinds of problems the benefits of Python 2 are kind of meh, so people stay in their comfort zone. For some kinds of problems, Python 3 is a huge, huge win over Python 2. Whether or not someone is a Python 3 advocate says more about the kinds of problems they work on than anything else.
  - dhon_ 9y ago
    How is the Twisted Py3 support coming along in practice? It looks like they are steadily ticking items off the todo list, but is it ready for production use yet?
    - dbcurtis 9y ago
      Everything I need is production worthy. That's obviously an idiosyncratic assessment.
fredley 9y ago
Yes, and while performance on some tasks has gotten worse, on others it has got much better - JSON serialisation in particular, which was huge for us. Python 3.7 will be faster again in many areas.
kajecounterhack 9y ago
+1 Just because we learned to work around unicode issues doesn't mean they're not completely bonkers in 2.7
- vetinari 9y ago
  Most people didn't learn to work around unicode issues during the 2.7 time frame. Many third party modules tended to explode spectacularly with encode/decode errors, when they were fed non-ascii strings, when used by people who write using all these funny characters. Just the correct handling of strings in Python 3 alone is a hell of a reason to switch to it.
  - bonesss 9y ago
    Let's not forget the joy of third party libraries that wouldn't fail, but rather silently convert, your data because they had hidden ascii asumptions...
__d 9y ago
I have a contrary anecdote: for the sorts of work I do, having to distinguish between strings and bytes makes using Python3 more difficult, and more prone to errors. I mostly deal with network protocols, lots of numeric content, and scarcely any non-English text. But I appreciate other people have different needs.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  I feel like the answer to this is "then use bytes everywhere". Why doesn't that work?
- orf 9y ago
  That's akin to saying: > For the sorts of work I do, having to distinguish between lists and dictionaries makes using Python 3 more difficult and more prone to errors. I mostly deal with lists, and scaresely any dictionaries. Just use bytes where appropriate.

by brians 9y ago

pc2g4d 9y ago

Yeah, I was pretty much sold on Python 3 when I stopped having to use the `codecs` module to read my files and when it would strictly enforce the separation between `bytes` and `str`, rather than having to manually track what sort of sequence I was dealing with.

dbcurtis 9y ago
Yes, yes. My Python life is mostly about impelemnting odd protocols with Twisted. Will probably get serious about asyncio soon, but I have a lot of historical Twisted to deal with ATM. I've noticed that the "Who cares about Python 3" types are not the people working on the kinds of problems I am. So my conclussion is that for many kinds of problems the benefits of Python 2 are kind of meh, so people stay in their comfort zone. For some kinds of problems, Python 3 is a huge, huge win over Python 2. Whether or not someone is a Python 3 advocate says more about the kinds of problems they work on than anything else.
- dhon_ 9y ago
  How is the Twisted Py3 support coming along in practice? It looks like they are steadily ticking items off the todo list, but is it ready for production use yet?
  - dbcurtis 9y ago
    Everything I need is production worthy. That's obviously an idiosyncratic assessment.

fredley 9y ago

Yes, and while performance on some tasks has gotten worse, on others it has got much better - JSON serialisation in particular, which was huge for us. Python 3.7 will be faster again in many areas.

kajecounterhack 9y ago

+1 Just because we learned to work around unicode issues doesn't mean they're not completely bonkers in 2.7

vetinari 9y ago
Most people didn't learn to work around unicode issues during the 2.7 time frame. Many third party modules tended to explode spectacularly with encode/decode errors, when they were fed non-ascii strings, when used by people who write using all these funny characters. Just the correct handling of strings in Python 3 alone is a hell of a reason to switch to it.
- bonesss 9y ago
  Let's not forget the joy of third party libraries that wouldn't fail, but rather silently convert, your data because they had hidden ascii asumptions...

__d 9y ago

I have a contrary anecdote: for the sorts of work I do, having to distinguish between strings and bytes makes using Python3 more difficult, and more prone to errors. I mostly deal with network protocols, lots of numeric content, and scarcely any non-English text. But I appreciate other people have different needs.

joshuamorton 9y ago
I feel like the answer to this is "then use bytes everywhere". Why doesn't that work?
orf 9y ago
That's akin to saying: > For the sorts of work I do, having to distinguish between lists and dictionaries makes using Python 3 more difficult and more prone to errors. I mostly deal with lists, and scaresely any dictionaries. Just use bytes where appropriate.