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> This is totally false - code produced by 2to3 no longer ran on 2. I don't see where GP made a claim that it would. Why would one expect code written for a ne

> This is totally false - code produced by 2to3 no longer ran on 2. I don't see where GP made a claim that it would. Why would one expect code written for a newer version, using features that don't exist in an older version, to run under the older version?

onphonenow 4y ago
This was the issue. Why should a new version make it hard to run old code for no particular reason except to break things. Folks using u”” were already being careful with Unicode . Supposedly Unicode was important enough for 3 to default to it. The cost benefit of then destroying code using u”” made no sense to me. It was unnecessary. This was followed by the oh just upgrade thing. I’d love to see the “quick” upgrade guidos employer did. My guess is a total lie that it was easy and it probably took years and VC type money. It’s not about using new features, it’s about not unnecessarily breaking old or allowing for cross compatibility.
josefx 4y ago
> using features that don't exist in an older version Except they broke the old way for existing features, required you to use the new way and in most cases you could manually write code so it would still work with both. Meanwhile the only tooling provided by the python 3 crowd screwed over anyone with an existing customer base stuck on python 2, which at least early on should have been a foreseeable problem. Not to forget that anyone stuck on python 2 was literally Satan and projects where outright "shamed" to drop python 2 support.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Given dependency chains the business case for these “quick” switches was often poor as well. Yes, Dropbox had $$ and guido - but that wasn’t everyone and most code was 2 at the time. Many folks would have been ok updating to 3 compatible approaches if it didn’t blow up their 2 story. That’s what ultimately happened in lots of cases when it became more doable. The rip and replace everything at once was a weird goal
qbasic_forever 4y ago
If you published libraries on pypi you were in exactly that nightmare scenario. How do you support users on both versions of python (because let's be real, it took _ten years_ to change so you had to support both major versions) without two totally separate codebases and all the massive headaches that entails. There were some partial solutions like the library six and all kinds of related tricks to write python that was compatible with both 2 and 3 at the same time.

onphonenow 4y ago

This was the issue. Why should a new version make it hard to run old code for no particular reason except to break things. Folks using u”” were already being careful with Unicode . Supposedly Unicode was important enough for 3 to default to it. The cost benefit of then destroying code using u”” made no sense to me. It was unnecessary. This was followed by the oh just upgrade thing. I’d love to see the “quick” upgrade guidos employer did. My guess is a total lie that it was easy and it probably took years and VC type money. It’s not about using new features, it’s about not unnecessarily breaking old or allowing for cross compatibility.

josefx 4y ago

> using features that don't exist in an older version Except they broke the old way for existing features, required you to use the new way and in most cases you could manually write code so it would still work with both. Meanwhile the only tooling provided by the python 3 crowd screwed over anyone with an existing customer base stuck on python 2, which at least early on should have been a foreseeable problem. Not to forget that anyone stuck on python 2 was literally Satan and projects where outright "shamed" to drop python 2 support.

onphonenow 4y ago
Given dependency chains the business case for these “quick” switches was often poor as well. Yes, Dropbox had $$ and guido - but that wasn’t everyone and most code was 2 at the time. Many folks would have been ok updating to 3 compatible approaches if it didn’t blow up their 2 story. That’s what ultimately happened in lots of cases when it became more doable. The rip and replace everything at once was a weird goal

qbasic_forever 4y ago

If you published libraries on pypi you were in exactly that nightmare scenario. How do you support users on both versions of python (because let's be real, it took _ten years_ to change so you had to support both major versions) without two totally separate codebases and all the massive headaches that entails. There were some partial solutions like the library six and all kinds of related tricks to write python that was compatible with both 2 and 3 at the same time.