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You underestimate how big of a change Python 3 actually was. Changing how strings and bytes are handled has a huge blast radius. It broke almost every library o
by Conan_Kudo 4y ago
You underestimate how big of a change Python 3 actually was. Changing how strings and bytes are handled has a huge blast radius. It broke almost every library or application I worked on. Everything else was peanuts to that semantic change.
It was a necessary change too. Supporting Unicode strings or mixed-encoded strings was absolutely awful in Python 2 and almost not worth doing. Python 3 made that work properly.
Arguably, the only real mistake was using UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 for strings. But back then, nobody knew what would take off and Windows natively uses UTF-16, so...
- sigzero 4y agoPython 2 to 3 wasn't even close to the change of Perl 5 to 6 (later Raku). Sorry, it just isn't even a comparison.
- mort96 4y agoPython 3 had a HUGE impact on existing code, yes. Everything broke. But Python 3 didn't actually change much for the people writing new Python code, it just broke the old code. Raku is a completely different language from Perl. Writing Raku instead of Perl 5 is like writing Rust instead of C++.