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I think that's the wrong takeaway, especially since it kind of absolves Python of doing anything wrong. There were many examples of ways that this was unduly ha

I think that's the wrong takeaway, especially since it kind of absolves Python of doing anything wrong. There were many examples of ways that this was unduly hard just because of how poorly the transition was designed for. > While hindsight is 20/20, many of the issues with Python 3 were obvious at the time and could have been mitigated had the language maintainers been more accommodating - and dare I say empathetic - to its users.

mikepurvis 7y ago
The author's suggestion of permitting a certain set of "from __past__" imports seems especially astute. This would have made it much more possible much earlier to have a single large codebase running natively on the Python 3 interpreter, but with modules (especially leaf modules) at varying degrees of ported-ness. In contrast, the original porting guidance for module authors was actually to maintain the Python 2 source as the master copy, and use 2to3 to transform it for running tests or cutting a Python 3 release. How is a transition ever supposed to happen if the new hotness is perpetually a second class citizen?
- masklinn 7y ago
  > The author's suggestion of permitting a certain set of "from __past__" imports seems especially astute. Hell that's essentially what ended up happening over time, as past features got reintroduced (the `u` prefix, bytes.__mod__, `callable` being reintroduced, `range` being improved, …), as well as the serious Python3-ification of the Python2 branch that was 2.7.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    I feel like "from __past__" would have allowed projects to get to the point where they were "on Python 3" much sooner, though. The mentality would have been "we're on Python 3, and we have a long tail of cleanup to do excising from-past out of our codebase" rather than "we and our users are all still on Python 2 but we thiiiiink our code is mostly using constructs that are Python 3 safe. We get a green CI checkmark, anyway, but who really knows."
peatmoss 7y ago
Hmm, I didn’t mean to convey that the Python 2/3 transition was done well. I think lots of projects have tried to port their community success to substantially different projects, and that most have failed for a variety of different reasons. Python 3 is a “success” in that a lot of people have moved. But it was, as you rightly point out, a hard won victory that left a lot of people unhappy.

mikepurvis 7y ago

The author's suggestion of permitting a certain set of "from __past__" imports seems especially astute. This would have made it much more possible much earlier to have a single large codebase running natively on the Python 3 interpreter, but with modules (especially leaf modules) at varying degrees of ported-ness. In contrast, the original porting guidance for module authors was actually to maintain the Python 2 source as the master copy, and use 2to3 to transform it for running tests or cutting a Python 3 release. How is a transition ever supposed to happen if the new hotness is perpetually a second class citizen?

masklinn 7y ago
> The author's suggestion of permitting a certain set of "from __past__" imports seems especially astute. Hell that's essentially what ended up happening over time, as past features got reintroduced (the `u` prefix, bytes.__mod__, `callable` being reintroduced, `range` being improved, …), as well as the serious Python3-ification of the Python2 branch that was 2.7.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I feel like "from __past__" would have allowed projects to get to the point where they were "on Python 3" much sooner, though. The mentality would have been "we're on Python 3, and we have a long tail of cleanup to do excising from-past out of our codebase" rather than "we and our users are all still on Python 2 but we thiiiiink our code is mostly using constructs that are Python 3 safe. We get a green CI checkmark, anyway, but who really knows."

peatmoss 7y ago

Hmm, I didn’t mean to convey that the Python 2/3 transition was done well. I think lots of projects have tried to port their community success to substantially different projects, and that most have failed for a variety of different reasons. Python 3 is a “success” in that a lot of people have moved. But it was, as you rightly point out, a hard won victory that left a lot of people unhappy.