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I'd like to follow this to its logical conclusion: Are you suggesting that it's desirable to make a new language vice improving an old one? (Related, but separ
by the__alchemist 6y ago
I'd like to follow this to its logical conclusion: Are you suggesting that it's desirable to make a new language vice improving an old one?
(Related, but separate:) Would you have preferred if Python 3 was released under a different name that didn't include "python"?
- xapata 6y agoNo, they should have made the breaking changes more slowly, piece by piece, with a couple minor versions depreciation cycle. Python 3 was too many changes simultaneously. But it also coincided with dramatic changes in the size and variety of the programming community. It was hard to anticipate the troubles, of course easy in hindsight.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYes, if you're going to break compatibility to a great enough extent. It would eliminate an immense amount of confusion. See what Perl did with Raku.
- donor20 6y agoYou fail to understand that they purposely broke compatibility for no benefit. That is not improving the language - that is being stupid. In python 2 you could specify a unicode literal with u''. So a natural evolutionary option if you had a unicode addiction and wanted python 3 to be unicode native, would be to treat u'' as unicode literals in python 3 as well. This let's the code run under python 2 still, and then you get unicode in 3. And if you are 3 only, just "blah blah" works as well - nice. But they didn't do that. They purposely took u'' out to make it hard to support 2 and 3. That is absolute stupidity. In other words, they BROKE compatibility for no benefit - but just to break it. They did the same thing with byte handling, jumped the io abstraction in - these things all destroyed performance and use cases.