4 ms·

I think the invention of Python 3 was an unhappy thing. It seems true that "there are still a lot of companies on 2.7" and it would be natural that they think

by suzuki 8y ago

I think the invention of Python 3 was an unhappy thing. It seems true that "there are still a lot of companies on 2.7" and it would be natural that they think "the last decade of Python work isn't really useful". The basic incompatibility between Python 2 and 3 comes from Unicode strings. The design of Python 3 might be adequate ten years ago when there are many character encodings in the world. However, they began to converge to UTF-8, you know. It would be rational now to use byte strings transparently overall just like in Golang. What people wanted would be a modernized Python that is compatible with Python 2 and it would have been feasible.

jcrubino 8y ago
Absolutely correct. Performance took a big hit in python 3 as well. If users are performance bound through use-case, chances are they are using pypy. If pypy3 is going to lag python3.6 + why upgrade at all. Pypy just got numpy and pandas. My sense is that Python 3 was redesigned with web-services in mind like Youtube, when the highest code contributing use-case in python was science and data pipeline related. The science users are all still using python, but only in ways that Python 3 enhancements were not especially important for.