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>By the same means, Python has distinct silos of code for each version. And the community keeps dragging along the old versions. So you end up with a lot of old

>By the same means, Python has distinct silos of code for each version. And the community keeps dragging along the old versions. So you end up with a lot of old, dead Python code that keeps getting dragged along because nobody wants to spend the time porting it to the latest version. As far as I can tell, nobody creates new code for Python2, but we drag it along because nobody's ported the needed code to Python3.x. At the official Python web site, their documentation is actively maintained and available for Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7 -- because they can't decide to give up on the old code. Python is like the zombie of programming languages -- the dead just keep walking on. I think I could make a comment on every one of this authors 'gripes' but I'll just do one for now. Does this author think a minor version update should immediately EOL the previous version (3.5,3.6)? And obviously this author never heard that Python 2.7 is EOL 2020 [1]. But you know just reading this author's problems that if Python 2.7 had been EOL right after 3 released, or if a minor version upgrade immediately EOLs the previous minor versions (seriously, how is this a complaint?) he'd be posting about that instead of these 'which version do I choose' issues. I just honestly can't believe a developer would complain about maintaining code for 'too long'. [1] https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/ https://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0373/

lmm 8y ago
> Does this author think a minor version update should immediately EOL the previous version (3.5,3.6)? More likely the author thinks minor version updates should be backward compatible, like they are in virtually every other language? In most languages you'd be able to uninstall 3.5 when you installed 3.6, because you'd be confident that all your 3.5 code would keep working in 3.6.
- Hello71 8y ago
  Except... they mostly are? As far as I can tell, Debian only ships one Python per major version per release, Fedora does the same, Arch does the same. Gentoo lets you install everything side-by-side, but it does the same thing for gcc, binutils, ruby, wine, llvm, and dozens of other packages, and I don't see the author complaining about those.
  - lmm 8y ago
    Well, it sounds like this author's employer required their devs to use multiple minor versions at once: > I was advised by one teammate that I needed to configure my environment so that everything uses the Python 3.5 base. This worked great until I started on a second project that needed Python 3.6. Might be an issue specific to that company of course.
    - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
      I think that whole paragraph he mixed up python 2 and 3. >However, Python installs in separate installations. My code for Python 3.5 won't work with the Python 3.7 installation unless I intentionally port it to 3.7. Enough Linux developers have decided that porting isn't worth the effort, so Ubuntu installs with both Python2 and Python3 -- because they are needed by different core functions. The way he just segways from talking about 3.5 to 3.7 seems really unnatural, I think he's talking more about from python 2 to 3, since that's what the second sentence is about. All code from 3.5 should work 3.7, unless they were using some undefined behavior of some sorts. A quick google reveals python 3.6 is fully backwards compatible with 3.5, and 3.7 has only 2 exceptions. The words async and await are now reserved. So even if he did have a problem with this, any ide, or even just a find replace in a text editor, would be able to refactor the 3.5 code to work. >https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html
      - lmm 8y ago
        > All code from 3.5 should work 3.7, unless they were using some undefined behavior of some sorts. Interesting; that certainly wasn't always the policy (e.g. I remember 2.4 -> 2.5 being a major, breaking upgrade) and maybe his employer never got the memo. If it's now the case that you can do fearless upgrades between minor versions then maybe that just needs to be better advertised.

lmm 8y ago

> Does this author think a minor version update should immediately EOL the previous version (3.5,3.6)? More likely the author thinks minor version updates should be backward compatible, like they are in virtually every other language? In most languages you'd be able to uninstall 3.5 when you installed 3.6, because you'd be confident that all your 3.5 code would keep working in 3.6.

Hello71 8y ago
Except... they mostly are? As far as I can tell, Debian only ships one Python per major version per release, Fedora does the same, Arch does the same. Gentoo lets you install everything side-by-side, but it does the same thing for gcc, binutils, ruby, wine, llvm, and dozens of other packages, and I don't see the author complaining about those.
- lmm 8y ago
  Well, it sounds like this author's employer required their devs to use multiple minor versions at once: > I was advised by one teammate that I needed to configure my environment so that everything uses the Python 3.5 base. This worked great until I started on a second project that needed Python 3.6. Might be an issue specific to that company of course.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    I think that whole paragraph he mixed up python 2 and 3. >However, Python installs in separate installations. My code for Python 3.5 won't work with the Python 3.7 installation unless I intentionally port it to 3.7. Enough Linux developers have decided that porting isn't worth the effort, so Ubuntu installs with both Python2 and Python3 -- because they are needed by different core functions. The way he just segways from talking about 3.5 to 3.7 seems really unnatural, I think he's talking more about from python 2 to 3, since that's what the second sentence is about. All code from 3.5 should work 3.7, unless they were using some undefined behavior of some sorts. A quick google reveals python 3.6 is fully backwards compatible with 3.5, and 3.7 has only 2 exceptions. The words async and await are now reserved. So even if he did have a problem with this, any ide, or even just a find replace in a text editor, would be able to refactor the 3.5 code to work. >https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html
    - lmm 8y ago
      > All code from 3.5 should work 3.7, unless they were using some undefined behavior of some sorts. Interesting; that certainly wasn't always the policy (e.g. I remember 2.4 -> 2.5 being a major, breaking upgrade) and maybe his employer never got the memo. If it's now the case that you can do fearless upgrades between minor versions then maybe that just needs to be better advertised.