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> It continues to be dissapointing that new releases of Python continue to be useless Useless for you :). Personally, I made the switch to Python 3 some time a

by sho_hn 14y ago

> It continues to be dissapointing that new releases of Python continue to be useless Useless for you :). Personally, I made the switch to Python 3 some time ago, and couldn't be happier. My dependencies are largely sorted these days, availability on the systems I need to deploy on is no longer an issue either, and I find it to be a cleaner, leaner language makes me more productive overall. Sure, there was a time when I read these 3.x announcements with a sort of weary, frustrated feeling, but now I'm back to feeling like a kid in a candy store and excited at what the new release is going to bring. I realize not everybody has made it to this side of the transition yet, but don't fret it, the day will come, and it's a nice place to be in.

saurik 14y ago
As I explained, for me that day will only come when I switch out a ton of libraries whose bugs and warts I had to painfully work around, as the maintainers have either left or explicitly replaced with different libraries. I question whether this effort is worth it. I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Most of my code is just gluing together libraries, from wrappers for libapt to PDF parsing and generation (for which I actually have to use two different libraries) to database bindings to advanced math. I have pages of import statements in my codebase... Near as I can tell, were I to start fresh and use Python 3, even if all the libraries I currently use were ported, I'd just come across a new use case that causes me to need a new library, and as that library will likely not be ported, I'll just be cursing my decision to have switched. Seriously: switching from Java to Clojure has less potential future regret than switching from Python 2 to 3. Hell: Java to C++ has better backwards compatibility (JNI is actually reasonable, and is easily abstractable).
- sho_hn 14y ago
  > I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Not that many, admittedly. I'm fairly wary of dependencies and prefer to stick to the standard lib unless something is just orders of magnitude better at the job, to cut down on deployment overhead. That attitude has of course benefited me tremendously with the Python 3 transition. That said, I currently use lxml and requests a lot, a long with a bunch of smaller things like python-dateutil and mock (the latter of which was just added to the standard lib in 3.3, actually). Sum total I have maybe 12-15 external libs across my codebases that I didn't write myself, and I've had only one case of an abandoned lib that I needed to port myself. As for my own code, when I started out transitioning I had already cut compatibility with anything older than 2.6, and making things run both on 2.6 and 3.1 turned out to be relatively easy for the most part (certainly with some pain points too however, like needing to abandon syntactic sugar for metaclasses). As the next step I went to 2.7/3.2, which made things even easier. Most of my code now still runs on 2.7 in addition to 3.2, but I'm now starting to abandon the notion of backwards compatibility and introducing code that relies on Python 3.2 and am slowly removing the hacks once required for cross-compat as I find need to touch the respective areas again. Now, I realize that I'm not the norm and that a lot of Python folks out there have a much harder time transitioning. But with the bleakness of your post, I felt compelled to point out that it's not been hell for all of us.
- the_mitsuhiko 14y ago
  > As I explained, for me that day will only come when I switch out a ton of libraries whose bugs and warts I had to painfully work around, as the maintainers have either left or explicitly replaced with different libraries. I question whether this effort is worth it. I can't see myself dropping 2.x support anytime soon.

by sho_hn 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

As I explained, for me that day will only come when I switch out a ton of libraries whose bugs and warts I had to painfully work around, as the maintainers have either left or explicitly replaced with different libraries. I question whether this effort is worth it. I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Most of my code is just gluing together libraries, from wrappers for libapt to PDF parsing and generation (for which I actually have to use two different libraries) to database bindings to advanced math. I have pages of import statements in my codebase... Near as I can tell, were I to start fresh and use Python 3, even if all the libraries I currently use were ported, I'd just come across a new use case that causes me to need a new library, and as that library will likely not be ported, I'll just be cursing my decision to have switched. Seriously: switching from Java to Clojure has less potential future regret than switching from Python 2 to 3. Hell: Java to C++ has better backwards compatibility (JNI is actually reasonable, and is easily abstractable).

sho_hn 14y ago
> I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Not that many, admittedly. I'm fairly wary of dependencies and prefer to stick to the standard lib unless something is just orders of magnitude better at the job, to cut down on deployment overhead. That attitude has of course benefited me tremendously with the Python 3 transition. That said, I currently use lxml and requests a lot, a long with a bunch of smaller things like python-dateutil and mock (the latter of which was just added to the standard lib in 3.3, actually). Sum total I have maybe 12-15 external libs across my codebases that I didn't write myself, and I've had only one case of an abandoned lib that I needed to port myself. As for my own code, when I started out transitioning I had already cut compatibility with anything older than 2.6, and making things run both on 2.6 and 3.1 turned out to be relatively easy for the most part (certainly with some pain points too however, like needing to abandon syntactic sugar for metaclasses). As the next step I went to 2.7/3.2, which made things even easier. Most of my code now still runs on 2.7 in addition to 3.2, but I'm now starting to abandon the notion of backwards compatibility and introducing code that relies on Python 3.2 and am slowly removing the hacks once required for cross-compat as I find need to touch the respective areas again. Now, I realize that I'm not the norm and that a lot of Python folks out there have a much harder time transitioning. But with the bleakness of your post, I felt compelled to point out that it's not been hell for all of us.
the_mitsuhiko 14y ago
> As I explained, for me that day will only come when I switch out a ton of libraries whose bugs and warts I had to painfully work around, as the maintainers have either left or explicitly replaced with different libraries. I question whether this effort is worth it. I can't see myself dropping 2.x support anytime soon.