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This reads a bit like "My neighbourhood is already perfect, I wish it would stop changing". Except as a sibling pointed out, you can live in your old unchanging

This reads a bit like "My neighbourhood is already perfect, I wish it would stop changing". Except as a sibling pointed out, you can live in your old unchanging neighbourhood just fine, you don't have to update it. Python changes because of three reasons: Addressing bugs and insecure patterns; support for new usage patterns in the community; updates for compatibility with newer devices and systems. The first one is a given. The second and third are basically "the world is evolving, with or without you". Even if you built a VM on your perfect machine, with your perfect python and perfect libraries and froze everything for 10 years, the moment you connected it to the internet you'd be faced with "Ah, my perfect version does not support this new thingamajig being used on the web". Freezing everything in time is just archiving.

guappa 2y ago
> Freezing everything in time is just archiving. None of this explains why python has the need to drop modules for the standard library. They claim "nobody is maintaining them"… but they are well funded and can easily afford someone to maintain them. I think at the core they don't care about backwards compatibility, but instead of doing it all at once like with python2/3 are now doing it little by little, creating a python4 without calling it so.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > now doing it little by little, creating a python4 without calling it so. That's the unfortunate modern trend. The web folks that move fast and break things love living on the bleeding edge, and create strong pressure for everyone to keep up, and that the answer to library compatibility is "wait until someone complains, fix the direct reason, cut a new release, and let the dependents fix their own code".
- scrollaway 2y ago
  > They claim "nobody is maintaining them"… but they are well funded and can easily afford someone to maintain them. You still have to find someone who both wants and can maintain them. That's not always a given. And also, why? If I donate to the PSF, do I really want my money to go into the maintenance of ... checks notes ... MacOS 9 path manipulation functions (https://docs.python.org/it/3.7/library/macpath.html https://docs.python.org/it/3.7/library/macpath.html)? Just because you're well-funded doesn't mean you get to spend money on useless things. And most of the python community would consider this useless. Nobody even made a pypi copy of it.
  - smcin 2y ago
    Agreed. The ironic downside of not having Windows-style telemetry is you can't prove how rarely-used obscure old packages are, or identify the small set of people still using them a decade after everyone else stopped. (You can search github repos for references, as a poor alternative.)
  - guappa 2y ago
    More useless or costly than not implementing rate limit at all on pypi, so that noobs at gigantic companies never ever use a cache or a mirror?
    - scrollaway 2y ago
      No idea how that’s related
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> updates for compatibility with newer devices and systems. Python is a couple abstraction layers above that, it's not supposed to even be directly exposed to things that vary frequently between devices. That's a job of the OS, the C compiler, and the libraries (most of which just link to C ones anyway).
mort96 2y ago
The rest of the world keeps changing. I can expend the effort to maintain, package and distribute my own Python fork, but things like the build scripts for libraries I use would eventually start requiring newer Python versions. I don't think Python is perfect, I don't mind changes. But I do mind backward incompatible changes a lot.

guappa 2y ago

> Freezing everything in time is just archiving. None of this explains why python has the need to drop modules for the standard library. They claim "nobody is maintaining them"… but they are well funded and can easily afford someone to maintain them. I think at the core they don't care about backwards compatibility, but instead of doing it all at once like with python2/3 are now doing it little by little, creating a python4 without calling it so.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> now doing it little by little, creating a python4 without calling it so. That's the unfortunate modern trend. The web folks that move fast and break things love living on the bleeding edge, and create strong pressure for everyone to keep up, and that the answer to library compatibility is "wait until someone complains, fix the direct reason, cut a new release, and let the dependents fix their own code".
scrollaway 2y ago
> They claim "nobody is maintaining them"… but they are well funded and can easily afford someone to maintain them. You still have to find someone who both wants and can maintain them. That's not always a given. And also, why? If I donate to the PSF, do I really want my money to go into the maintenance of ... checks notes ... MacOS 9 path manipulation functions (https://docs.python.org/it/3.7/library/macpath.html https://docs.python.org/it/3.7/library/macpath.html)? Just because you're well-funded doesn't mean you get to spend money on useless things. And most of the python community would consider this useless. Nobody even made a pypi copy of it.
- smcin 2y ago
  Agreed. The ironic downside of not having Windows-style telemetry is you can't prove how rarely-used obscure old packages are, or identify the small set of people still using them a decade after everyone else stopped. (You can search github repos for references, as a poor alternative.)
- guappa 2y ago
  More useless or costly than not implementing rate limit at all on pypi, so that noobs at gigantic companies never ever use a cache or a mirror?
  - scrollaway 2y ago
    No idea how that’s related

TeMPOraL 2y ago

> updates for compatibility with newer devices and systems. Python is a couple abstraction layers above that, it's not supposed to even be directly exposed to things that vary frequently between devices. That's a job of the OS, the C compiler, and the libraries (most of which just link to C ones anyway).

mort96 2y ago

The rest of the world keeps changing. I can expend the effort to maintain, package and distribute my own Python fork, but things like the build scripts for libraries I use would eventually start requiring newer Python versions. I don't think Python is perfect, I don't mind changes. But I do mind backward incompatible changes a lot.