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Progress needs to be made, and sometimes dropping support for stuff you no longer want to spend time supporting makes sense. That said, I still think situation

by Chris2048 6y ago

Progress needs to be made, and sometimes dropping support for stuff you no longer want to spend time supporting makes sense. That said, I still think situation is mishandled for this reason: py3 is basically another language, similar to py2. Calling it py3 is an exercise in marketing - instead of creating a new language to compete with py2 (along with all similar languages e.g. Julia) the existing py2 community was leveraged/shamed* into supporting the new thing, and most importantly, py2 was killed by it's maintainers (rather than handed off) so it couldn't compete with py3, and so that users would be forced to move somewhere else - py3 being the easiest. If it had properly been a new language, they could have taken more liberties (compat breaking) to fix issues, like a single official package manager. And migration to py3 would have been more by consent, than by force. * https://python3wos.appspot.com/ https://python3wos.appspot.com/

carapace 6y ago
Very much this. It's a separate language that, if it hadn't been pushed by BDFL and co., if it had appeared as an independent project (like e.g. Stackless Python or something), would have had to live or die on its own merits. - - - - An additional aspect that I see as an old Python user is the "poisoning of the well" of the inclusive and welcoming spirit of the community. We (I'm speaking as a Pythonista here) have had problems with this in the past (remember how grouchy effbot could be? He's a sweet person IRL though.) We made great progress and got a lot of acceptance in the educational and academic worlds. Now just read this very thread and you'll find so many people making curt dismissive comments to folks who aren't on board with Python 3. I still love and respect GvR (I once, with his permission, gave him a hug!) even though I think he messed up with this 2->3 business (and in any event, the drama around language innovation eventually pushed him to resign, as we all know.) He's a human being. And a pretty good one. I guess what I'm trying to say is Python 3 won. Let us (all of us) be gracious about it.

carapace 6y ago

Very much this. It's a separate language that, if it hadn't been pushed by BDFL and co., if it had appeared as an independent project (like e.g. Stackless Python or something), would have had to live or die on its own merits. - - - - An additional aspect that I see as an old Python user is the "poisoning of the well" of the inclusive and welcoming spirit of the community. We (I'm speaking as a Pythonista here) have had problems with this in the past (remember how grouchy effbot could be? He's a sweet person IRL though.) We made great progress and got a lot of acceptance in the educational and academic worlds. Now just read this very thread and you'll find so many people making curt dismissive comments to folks who aren't on board with Python 3. I still love and respect GvR (I once, with his permission, gave him a hug!) even though I think he messed up with this 2->3 business (and in any event, the drama around language innovation eventually pushed him to resign, as we all know.) He's a human being. And a pretty good one. I guess what I'm trying to say is Python 3 won. Let us (all of us) be gracious about it.