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Guido has done some pycon keynotes in the recent past and said himself he takes some of the blame for the transition. He says he greatly underestimated the imp

Guido has done some pycon keynotes in the recent past and said himself he takes some of the blame for the transition. He says he greatly underestimated the impact of breaking changes and the inertia to get the community to change code. In particular not shipping tools to help automate the migration, or even thinking through a migration path with targeted backwards compatibility/back ports from the start (these eventually came quite a few releases and years into the transition). I don't think it's fair to say the community was entirely at fault for the length of time. edit: This talk he did from pycascades 2018 in particular I remember seeing and being a good retrospective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiw23yfqQy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oiw23yfqQy8

k__ 4y ago
Codemods aren't a thing in Python?
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  They are a thing, the ast module was created to help with the transition and tooling to automate some of the conversion: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html IIRC it wasn't there at the start though.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  What is a "codemod"?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    A codemod is an automated refactor. Codemods are typically done by writing scripts that manipulate the AST of code in files or by writing a regex to find and replace. The name originates from an internal script at Facebook called codemod. It had a public open source fork if you are curious. https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod
    - marssaxman 4y ago
      Thanks for the explanation!
acdha 4y ago
I think both of you are looking at some of the same problems from different angles, and there are some interesting ways in which the community shifted over the same time period. I suspect some of Guido’s instincts were guided by the earlier community which was more early-adopters, and simply younger. The 1 to 2 migration was easier because the median developer was far more motivated to switch - you weren’t using it if you weren’t a fan. Python’s rise brought tensions there in multiple ways - business users started wanting longer-term support and tools for migrating large code bases, but relatively few would pay for them, and some maintainers had either drifted away or retired, or simply had less time available due to things like starting families or getting promoted. The 2 to 3 migration really highlighted the gap between commercial open source and hobbyist projects, and I’m sure now anyone would fundraise for support having seen how that worked out. The other thing we’ve been seeing is a switch to faster releases industry wide and I think that showed some serious tech debt. Projects which have CI & decent tests had a much easier time shipping updates or having two release series for an while, and the 2 to 3 migration really highlighted that. Some of the griping was really showing that older projects often had the frictional disincentive of that tool. That’s still relevant because of the way security issues are forcing more frequent updates now.

k__ 4y ago

Codemods aren't a thing in Python?

qbasic_forever 4y ago
They are a thing, the ast module was created to help with the transition and tooling to automate some of the conversion: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html IIRC it wasn't there at the start though.
marssaxman 4y ago
What is a "codemod"?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- charcircuit 4y ago
  A codemod is an automated refactor. Codemods are typically done by writing scripts that manipulate the AST of code in files or by writing a regex to find and replace. The name originates from an internal script at Facebook called codemod. It had a public open source fork if you are curious. https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Thanks for the explanation!

acdha 4y ago

I think both of you are looking at some of the same problems from different angles, and there are some interesting ways in which the community shifted over the same time period. I suspect some of Guido’s instincts were guided by the earlier community which was more early-adopters, and simply younger. The 1 to 2 migration was easier because the median developer was far more motivated to switch - you weren’t using it if you weren’t a fan. Python’s rise brought tensions there in multiple ways - business users started wanting longer-term support and tools for migrating large code bases, but relatively few would pay for them, and some maintainers had either drifted away or retired, or simply had less time available due to things like starting families or getting promoted. The 2 to 3 migration really highlighted the gap between commercial open source and hobbyist projects, and I’m sure now anyone would fundraise for support having seen how that worked out. The other thing we’ve been seeing is a switch to faster releases industry wide and I think that showed some serious tech debt. Projects which have CI & decent tests had a much easier time shipping updates or having two release series for an while, and the 2 to 3 migration really highlighted that. Some of the griping was really showing that older projects often had the frictional disincentive of that tool. That’s still relevant because of the way security issues are forcing more frequent updates now.