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> every script in Python 2 that used print without () broke in Python 3. There were other breaking changes. Some software still depends on installing Python 2

> every script in Python 2 that used print without () broke in Python 3. There were other breaking changes. Some software still depends on installing Python 2 People had 15 years to move from 2 to 3. I had to port dodo files from 2 to 3, it's a 10 minutes job. Most of the time, running 2to3 on it does the job automatically. After all, you only use the stlib for task runners, delegating a lot of work to bash, and they are quite short. > It's not really a language where you can write something and be confident it'll still work in ten years I still have Python 2.7 projects running fine, and reinstalled one serving half million users a few month ago. But even without this, Python was created in 1991, and Python 3 was released in 2008, that's 17 years between first release and the first big migration. To compare, go is 14 years old. In total. Plus your build file will have been edited so many times by the end 10 years anyway. Make has a lot going for it, but this is a terrible argument.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
And yet, almost every random python script I come across does not work on my system, either because of modules or installation layout differences between the authors system and mine, or the passage of a mere few months or a year of time. They are usually fixable of course. Assuming the thing worked on the authors system at all, it's possible to diagnose and fix it up for the current environment. But that has to be done, and sometimes takes more than a few minutes to hunt everything down. And then one day I started seeing these pyc directories appearing out of the blue, right in whatever directory any script happened to be in. The same scripts that didn't do that yesterday. What an awesome thoughtfully engineered system! The argument was not terrible, it was plain lived experience fact.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

And yet, almost every random python script I come across does not work on my system, either because of modules or installation layout differences between the authors system and mine, or the passage of a mere few months or a year of time. They are usually fixable of course. Assuming the thing worked on the authors system at all, it's possible to diagnose and fix it up for the current environment. But that has to be done, and sometimes takes more than a few minutes to hunt everything down. And then one day I started seeing these pyc directories appearing out of the blue, right in whatever directory any script happened to be in. The same scripts that didn't do that yesterday. What an awesome thoughtfully engineered system! The argument was not terrible, it was plain lived experience fact.