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Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Qu

by cletus 8y ago

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much strictly email and most things go through one of the "inner circle" who are largely responsible for areas like networking. As brash as he can be, you pretty much know what to expect and you have delegation. Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. This should go down as something to be studied for years on how not to do a breaking change. IIRC Python 3 was released in 2008. Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7. My favourite Python 3ism was the removal of the s and u string literal prefixes. In Python 2.0+, u'this is a string' was a Unicode literal prefix. It was removed in 3.0 for reasons that are beyond me (I know Unicode became the default for string literals) but then added back in 3.3 for backwards compatibility. Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. But this just went to the perception that the Python powers-that-be were removed from reality in their hubris. Anyway, GvR... one can't help but respect his stewardship and contribution to Python. Please make no mistake about that. The weird thing about human nature is in situations like this, if the peanut gallery senses they're getting to you it only encourages them. Sad but true.

thanatos_dem 8y ago
> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/ https://pythonclock.org/
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.
    - Bahamut 8y ago
      Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        I don't know, we have a codebase of 100k loc of Python 2.7 and I migrated much of it in two or three weeks myself. I don't think the fact that companies don't spend some time drawing up a strategy is the language's problem.
      - not2b 8y ago
        My company is one of them: plenty of legacy Python and no plans to switch to 3.x that I am aware of.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      What about the people who do read HN and comment here? My reply was to one such comment.
  - mnd999 8y ago
    I had to write some 2.7 the other day - a vendor supplied docker image we needed to run a script on only supported that version. Until stuff like that goes away, we’re still gonna be stuck with 2.7.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
- cletus 8y ago
  No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.
  - thanatos_dem 8y ago
    > No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. No idea what I did to deserve that tone. That site also gives a high level overview of the change, which is why I linked it. > What’s to stop someone else from backporting security fixes as needed ad infinitum? Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle. “Someone will probably support it by the end of the year” is not the most robust security model.
    - cletus 8y ago
      Sorry, I didn't mean to direct harshness at you. It's more my continued amazement at the Python 3 debacle that drove my response. You can tell a lot about how a project is run and the people running it by their attitude to breaking changes. Java, for example, has taken this very seriously. I mean it also explains why generics are kind of the mess they are but they didn't really have a lot of good choices here. What's more, people can compile older code with newer compilers by setting the language version. Rust seems to be making the right noises. Since 1.0 I'm not sure if there has been any and their plan is to save those for major versions. Perl 6... is an interesting one. Perl 5 actually had a lot of momentum but Perl 6 pretty much drove Perl into irrelevancy. C# did make breaking changes but did it sufficiently early and they benefitted from the second mover advantage learning from Java's mistakes. IIRC C# added generics without type erasure in 2.0? Python 3 was I think almost Python's Perl 6 moment. The only thing that probably saved Python from sliding into history was things like numpy/scipy, ML (eg pytorch), etc. Here's where the GIL doesn't really matter and Python's interface to C modules works really well. For other applications people have (IMHO) started to move away from dynamic languages, something I personally support. The way I like to describe dynamic languages is you end up writing unit tests for spelling mistakes.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  Lots of Google stuff runs on 2.7 (eg. even recently published build scripts) and it looks like Google is going to maintain 2.7 for themselves if necessary rather than porting tons of scripts over to 3. I can't help but agree with their utilitarian approach here.
  - dswalter 8y ago
    Honestly, I view Google as a large impediment to python3. If they'd bit the bullet and spent 10MM on transitioning over back in 2012 or so, the perception that 2.7 was still 'the real python' wouldn't have persisted nearly as long. When tensorflow was released (november 2015), it was python2 only!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dswalter 8y ago
> no end in sight for Python 2.7 That's not correct. Numpy, for example, will not be supporting python2.7 starting January 1st, 2020 (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python2.7-proposal.html https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python...), and there are others in the process. Python itself will stop supporting 2.7 on January 1st, 2020. (see https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches) Has it been poorly managed? Yes. Will a number of companies skip upgrading from python2 to python3 and instead rewrite it in Go or Rust? Absolutely. But "no end in sight" is not an accurate depiction of the current state of affairs.
guitarbill 8y ago
> Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. Presumably because a tool like 2to3 could strip it out, leaving it in is confusing, and there already existed a better solution for forwards compatibility (unicode literals future flag). With hindsight, the wrong call, but not completely nonsensical from what I can tell.
ansible 8y ago
> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. To know what's going through the USA President's brain right now? Yes. For a leader of a technical project? I doubt it. If anyone's got a concern about what you're working on, and can't be arsed to go to the relevant forum or mailing list and say so there... well, it probably wasn't valid anyway. Some (even if trivally small) barrier to entry for a technical community is good and useful. Twitter on the other hand... maybe a non-existent barrier to entry is good for political discourse (that's another conversation), but I don't see how you're easily going to distinguish the wheat from the chaff on really wide-open forums like that for technical communities.
- afiori 8y ago
  > To know what's going through the USA President's brain right now? Yes. Even here the utility is dubious. A main product of Trump's twitter is food for comedians or useless information. I believe it is important to keep updated on politics and to hold people in power to high standards, but few of the things Trump has to say cannot wait a day. Actually you could say that twitter availability is a cause of Trump expressing so many controversial statements.
  - shitgoose 8y ago
    let's go to the source. here is the latest tweet from him. how is it hilarious? "Today, it was my true honor to present the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy—for the second year in a row, to the @ArmyWP_Football Black Knights. Congratulations once again on your historic victories, and keep on making us proud!" i don't want to start a political debate, but blanket statements are rarely useful and can be easily verified.
    - afiori 8y ago
      > but blanket statements are rarely useful I agree, I was sloppy in my comment and did no good at representing a good point. I am somewhat critical of the "we need to keep updated to the hour" mindset also because I tend to selectively focus on the negative sides. Before reentering this discussion in the future I should better focus on understanding my own positions.
gwern 8y ago
> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. You could've said much the same thing of Usenet too. GvR didn't seem to have any trouble with Usenet back then, but 30 years later, at age 63, apparently now Twitter is the ne plus ultra of toxicity (which will amuse everyone who remembers Usenet). Maybe GvR has just gotten old, and it's not Twitter at all.
- eesmith 8y ago
  When did van Rossum stop participating in Usenet? Usenet 30 years ago was a lot easier to deal with than Usenet 20 years ago. In 1996 I savored the handful of c.l.py posts per day. By 2002 I was overwhelmed, and that was after most development messages switched over to python-dev.
bluGill 8y ago
I disagree, the python 2-3 change goes down as one of the best breaking changes I've ever seen. A long documented timeline. The u thing is a perfect example of learning from your mistakes and fixing them. Of course not having a breaking change is preferable, but that isn't always realistic.
- afiori 8y ago
  So Best in the sense that we all have learned a lot from their failure? Jokes aside, my uninformed opinion on how it could have been a better breaking change would have been to have the python3 able to understand properly python2. So that everyone could start using the same updated interpreter by setting appropriate flags or with thin wrappers. This way people could have moved to py3 and still run isolated bubbles of python 2.
- mytherin 8y ago
  The thing is they could have done so much more with breaking changes. They could have fixed the broken module system, removed the GIL or improved performance by an order of magnitude by removing language features that almost nobody uses but prevent important optimizations. Instead they caused a huge rift in the Python community and 10+ years of continued pain for what? Improved unicode support and removing the ability to type "print x"?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    What of those things are implementation details that don't need a new language to fix though? Jpython has never had the GIL, there is no reason you can't remove it from python without doing a breaking change as well. (it might break buggy programs by python can carefully never promised you can rely on the GIL) You claim there are language features to remove, if true you are correct they should have done that. That said in my experience most outsiders claiming some "rarely used" feature is the cause of some slowness don't have data to back their claims up. Often the feature is in fact used by some important subset. Often the feature isn't the cause of any slowdown. Improved unicode support is a very good thing to have. Maybe you don't have to support users outside of Western Europe and the Americas where ascii works well enough. (this also excludes various native languages in the Americas and assumes the non-English marks on various letters can be ignored) Anyone who can't do that is glad to not have to fight Unicode in python. "print x" is a minor thing, but it makes the language better for the stated goals.
anc84 8y ago
> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. You weren't serious, "like, ever" is obvious false. Of course there are good things. For me: Tech support both ways, job offers, knowledge of latest releases and new developments in my area of expertise. It's awesome.
ckastner 8y ago
> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? There is no doubt that Twitter dramatically changed public dialog. It was/is revolutionary. Whether this revolution was a net positive or negative remains to be seen. I'm highly doubtful. I actually believe that, despite the benefits, the net effect on public dialogue will be catastrophic. The overall attention span of people seems to have been limited to 282 characters, with a lifetime of perhaps 48 hours or less. The argument that rises to the top is rarely the intellectually most valuable one, not that it would live on for more than a day or two anyway. Instead it's just the best punch line, one-uppance, or outrage fodder de jour. Ironically, the best example of this deevolution IMO was Kara Swisher's interview of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was just a train wreck no one could follow [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/its-impossible-follow-conversation-twitter/582907/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/its-i...
detaro 8y ago
I think Python 3 isn't that relevant for this. The nastiness was way more in more recent, smaller decisions than in the Python3 migration which has been a decided thing for quite a while.
BuckRogers 7y ago
>Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. The on-going Python3 transition is why I decided to make the leap to either the Java or C# space. I chose C# since I'm as interested in applications (a core C# strength IMHO) as I am backend (Java dominated, but .Net is also here). Given the technical limitations of CPython, breaking changes and general lack of wholistic support that you see from the vendors supporting Java and .Net, I am now a very happy .Net developer. Otherwise, I really loved Python. I just wouldn't use it to build anything, C# for me and Java is a fine alternative. I don't understand the hate for either, they seem industrial strength and work well for me. I can also find a job doing either of those anywhere in the country or world. Python is big, but not that big. Guido can be thanked for forcing me to review what was truly in my best interest as I moved my career forward.

by cletus 8y ago

thanatos_dem 8y ago

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/ https://pythonclock.org/

StavrosK 8y ago
Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.
  - Bahamut 8y ago
    Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      I don't know, we have a codebase of 100k loc of Python 2.7 and I migrated much of it in two or three weeks myself. I don't think the fact that companies don't spend some time drawing up a strategy is the language's problem.
    - not2b 8y ago
      My company is one of them: plenty of legacy Python and no plans to switch to 3.x that I am aware of.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    What about the people who do read HN and comment here? My reply was to one such comment.
- mnd999 8y ago
  I had to write some 2.7 the other day - a vendor supplied docker image we needed to run a script on only supported that version. Until stuff like that goes away, we’re still gonna be stuck with 2.7.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
cletus 8y ago
No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.
- thanatos_dem 8y ago
  > No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. No idea what I did to deserve that tone. That site also gives a high level overview of the change, which is why I linked it. > What’s to stop someone else from backporting security fixes as needed ad infinitum? Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle. “Someone will probably support it by the end of the year” is not the most robust security model.
  - cletus 8y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to direct harshness at you. It's more my continued amazement at the Python 3 debacle that drove my response. You can tell a lot about how a project is run and the people running it by their attitude to breaking changes. Java, for example, has taken this very seriously. I mean it also explains why generics are kind of the mess they are but they didn't really have a lot of good choices here. What's more, people can compile older code with newer compilers by setting the language version. Rust seems to be making the right noises. Since 1.0 I'm not sure if there has been any and their plan is to save those for major versions. Perl 6... is an interesting one. Perl 5 actually had a lot of momentum but Perl 6 pretty much drove Perl into irrelevancy. C# did make breaking changes but did it sufficiently early and they benefitted from the second mover advantage learning from Java's mistakes. IIRC C# added generics without type erasure in 2.0? Python 3 was I think almost Python's Perl 6 moment. The only thing that probably saved Python from sliding into history was things like numpy/scipy, ML (eg pytorch), etc. Here's where the GIL doesn't really matter and Python's interface to C modules works really well. For other applications people have (IMHO) started to move away from dynamic languages, something I personally support. The way I like to describe dynamic languages is you end up writing unit tests for spelling mistakes.
tannhaeuser 8y ago
Lots of Google stuff runs on 2.7 (eg. even recently published build scripts) and it looks like Google is going to maintain 2.7 for themselves if necessary rather than porting tons of scripts over to 3. I can't help but agree with their utilitarian approach here.
- dswalter 8y ago
  Honestly, I view Google as a large impediment to python3. If they'd bit the bullet and spent 10MM on transitioning over back in 2012 or so, the perception that 2.7 was still 'the real python' wouldn't have persisted nearly as long. When tensorflow was released (november 2015), it was python2 only!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dswalter 8y ago

> no end in sight for Python 2.7 That's not correct. Numpy, for example, will not be supporting python2.7 starting January 1st, 2020 (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python2.7-proposal.html https://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy-1.14.2/neps/dropping-python...), and there are others in the process. Python itself will stop supporting 2.7 on January 1st, 2020. (see https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches) Has it been poorly managed? Yes. Will a number of companies skip upgrading from python2 to python3 and instead rewrite it in Go or Rust? Absolutely. But "no end in sight" is not an accurate depiction of the current state of affairs.

guitarbill 8y ago

> Why remove it in the first place? It makes no sense. Presumably because a tool like 2to3 could strip it out, leaving it in is confusing, and there already existed a better solution for forwards compatibility (unicode literals future flag). With hindsight, the wrong call, but not completely nonsensical from what I can tell.

ansible 8y ago

> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. To know what's going through the USA President's brain right now? Yes. For a leader of a technical project? I doubt it. If anyone's got a concern about what you're working on, and can't be arsed to go to the relevant forum or mailing list and say so there... well, it probably wasn't valid anyway. Some (even if trivally small) barrier to entry for a technical community is good and useful. Twitter on the other hand... maybe a non-existent barrier to entry is good for political discourse (that's another conversation), but I don't see how you're easily going to distinguish the wheat from the chaff on really wide-open forums like that for technical communities.

afiori 8y ago
> To know what's going through the USA President's brain right now? Yes. Even here the utility is dubious. A main product of Trump's twitter is food for comedians or useless information. I believe it is important to keep updated on politics and to hold people in power to high standards, but few of the things Trump has to say cannot wait a day. Actually you could say that twitter availability is a cause of Trump expressing so many controversial statements.
- shitgoose 8y ago
  let's go to the source. here is the latest tweet from him. how is it hilarious? "Today, it was my true honor to present the Commander-in-Chief’s Trophy—for the second year in a row, to the @ArmyWP_Football Black Knights. Congratulations once again on your historic victories, and keep on making us proud!" i don't want to start a political debate, but blanket statements are rarely useful and can be easily verified.
  - afiori 8y ago
    > but blanket statements are rarely useful I agree, I was sloppy in my comment and did no good at representing a good point. I am somewhat critical of the "we need to keep updated to the hour" mindset also because I tend to selectively focus on the negative sides. Before reentering this discussion in the future I should better focus on understanding my own positions.

gwern 8y ago

> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. You could've said much the same thing of Usenet too. GvR didn't seem to have any trouble with Usenet back then, but 30 years later, at age 63, apparently now Twitter is the ne plus ultra of toxicity (which will amuse everyone who remembers Usenet). Maybe GvR has just gotten old, and it's not Twitter at all.

eesmith 8y ago
When did van Rossum stop participating in Usenet? Usenet 30 years ago was a lot easier to deal with than Usenet 20 years ago. In 1996 I savored the handful of c.l.py posts per day. By 2002 I was overwhelmed, and that was after most development messages switched over to python-dev.

bluGill 8y ago

I disagree, the python 2-3 change goes down as one of the best breaking changes I've ever seen. A long documented timeline. The u thing is a perfect example of learning from your mistakes and fixing them. Of course not having a breaking change is preferable, but that isn't always realistic.

afiori 8y ago
So Best in the sense that we all have learned a lot from their failure? Jokes aside, my uninformed opinion on how it could have been a better breaking change would have been to have the python3 able to understand properly python2. So that everyone could start using the same updated interpreter by setting appropriate flags or with thin wrappers. This way people could have moved to py3 and still run isolated bubbles of python 2.
mytherin 8y ago
The thing is they could have done so much more with breaking changes. They could have fixed the broken module system, removed the GIL or improved performance by an order of magnitude by removing language features that almost nobody uses but prevent important optimizations. Instead they caused a huge rift in the Python community and 10+ years of continued pain for what? Improved unicode support and removing the ability to type "print x"?
- bluGill 8y ago
  What of those things are implementation details that don't need a new language to fix though? Jpython has never had the GIL, there is no reason you can't remove it from python without doing a breaking change as well. (it might break buggy programs by python can carefully never promised you can rely on the GIL) You claim there are language features to remove, if true you are correct they should have done that. That said in my experience most outsiders claiming some "rarely used" feature is the cause of some slowness don't have data to back their claims up. Often the feature is in fact used by some important subset. Often the feature isn't the cause of any slowdown. Improved unicode support is a very good thing to have. Maybe you don't have to support users outside of Western Europe and the Americas where ascii works well enough. (this also excludes various native languages in the Americas and assumes the non-English marks on various letters can be ignored) Anyone who can't do that is glad to not have to fight Unicode in python. "print x" is a minor thing, but it makes the language better for the stated goals.

anc84 8y ago

> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. You weren't serious, "like, ever" is obvious false. Of course there are good things. For me: Tech support both ways, job offers, knowledge of latest releases and new developments in my area of expertise. It's awesome.

ckastner 8y ago

> Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? There is no doubt that Twitter dramatically changed public dialog. It was/is revolutionary. Whether this revolution was a net positive or negative remains to be seen. I'm highly doubtful. I actually believe that, despite the benefits, the net effect on public dialogue will be catastrophic. The overall attention span of people seems to have been limited to 282 characters, with a lifetime of perhaps 48 hours or less. The argument that rises to the top is rarely the intellectually most valuable one, not that it would live on for more than a day or two anyway. Instead it's just the best punch line, one-uppance, or outrage fodder de jour. Ironically, the best example of this deevolution IMO was Kara Swisher's interview of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was just a train wreck no one could follow [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/its-impossible-follow-conversation-twitter/582907/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/its-i...

detaro 8y ago

I think Python 3 isn't that relevant for this. The nastiness was way more in more recent, smaller decisions than in the Python3 migration which has been a decided thing for quite a while.

BuckRogers 7y ago

>Honestly, I wonder how much of this goes back to GvR's handling of Python 3. The on-going Python3 transition is why I decided to make the leap to either the Java or C# space. I chose C# since I'm as interested in applications (a core C# strength IMHO) as I am backend (Java dominated, but .Net is also here). Given the technical limitations of CPython, breaking changes and general lack of wholistic support that you see from the vendors supporting Java and .Net, I am now a very happy .Net developer. Otherwise, I really loved Python. I just wouldn't use it to build anything, C# for me and Java is a fine alternative. I don't understand the hate for either, they seem industrial strength and work well for me. I can also find a job doing either of those anywhere in the country or world. Python is big, but not that big. Guido can be thanked for forcing me to review what was truly in my best interest as I moved my career forward.