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Oh yeah, I totally get the motivation behind it. It's always very tempting to want to make things faster. But I can't help but wondering if these attempts to ma

Oh yeah, I totally get the motivation behind it. It's always very tempting to want to make things faster. But I can't help but wondering if these attempts to make it faster might end up just making it worse. On the other hand though, Python is so big and there's so many corps using it with so much cash that maybe they can get away with just breaking shit every few releases and people will just go adapt packages to the changes.

dagmx 2y ago
Python famously has a community that does NOT adapt to changes well. See the Python 2 to 3 transition.
- eigenspace 2y ago
  Python's community was significantly smaller and less flushed with cash during the 2 to 3 transition. Since then there has been numerous 3.x releases that were breaking and people seem to have been sucking it up and dealing with it quietly so far. The main thing is that unlike the 2 to 3 transition, they're not breaking syntax (for the most part?), which everyone experiences and has an opinion on, they're breaking rather deep down things that for the most part only the big packages rely on so most users don't experience it much at all.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    I disagree with this entire comment. The Python community consisted of tons of developers including very wealthy companies. At what point in the last few years would you even say they became “rich enough” to do the migration? Because people are STILL talking about trying to fork 2.7 into a 2.8. I also disagree with your assertion that 3.x releases have significant breaking changes. Could you point to any specific major breaking changes between 3.x releases? 2 to 3 didn’t break syntax for most code either. It largely cleaned house on sensible API defaults.
    - eigenspace 2y ago
      Fair enough. You may be totally right here, as I mentioned I don't use Python much at all since like 2017 and haven't paid it much attention in a while. I retract my comment. Regarding breakage in 3.x, all I know is that I recall several times where I did a linux system update (rolling release), and that updated my Python to a newly released version which broke various things in my system. I'm pretty sure one of these was v3.10, but I forget which others caused me problems which I could only solve by pinning Python to an older release. It's entirely possible though that no actual APIs were broken and that this was just accidentaly bugs in the release, or the packages were being naughty and relying on internals they shouldn't have relied on or something else.
      - dagmx 2y ago
        To your last point: it’s neither the language nor the packages but rather it’s the ABI. Python isn’t fully ABI stable (though it’s improved greatly) so you can’t just intermix compiled dependencies between different versions of Python. This is true for many packages in your distro as well.
        eigenspace 2y ago
        Ah I see. Yeah, I guess I just think that for a language that's so dependent on FFI, instability in the ABI is defacto instability in the language as far as I'm concerned. But I understand that not everyone feels the same. Almost every major noteworthy Python package uses the ABI, so instability there is going to constantly be felt ecosystem wide.
        dbsmith83 2y ago
        There have been many breaking changes throughout python 3.x releases: - standard library modules removed - zip error handling behaves differently - changes to collections module - new reserved keywords (async, await, etc.) You can argue how big of a deal it is or isn't, but there were definitely breakages that violate semantic versioning
        2y ago
- Yossarrian22 2y ago
  Are there communities that handle such a change well? At least that went better than Perl and Raku
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Anything where the language frontend isn’t tied to the ABI compatibility of the artifacts I think. They can mix versions/editions without worry. I think it’s a larger problem with interpreted languages where all the source has to be in a single version. In that case I cant think of much.
- adamc 2y ago
  That was, in many ways, a crazy difficult transition. I don't think most languages have gone through such a thing. Perl tried and died. So I don't agree that it reflects poorly on the community; I think the plan itself was too ambitious.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Many languages have. There were significant breaks in C++ when stringabi changed, Swift has had major language changes, rust has editions. The difference is in what motivates getting to the other end of that transition bump and how big the bump is. That’s why it took till past 2.7’s EOL to actually get people on to 3 in a big way because they’d drag their feet if they don’t see a big enough change. Compiled languages have it easier because they don’t need to mix source between dependencies, they just have to be ABI compatible.
lanstin 2y ago
I think I am much happier to redo my personal scripts to stay at bleeding edge than to rewrite old code at work to stay in supported versions. For corporations wanton breaking changes means code that is working and has some non-zero risk to change has to have budget spent on it just to stay in place. Just this week I failed to convince a team to migrate their ten year old maintenance mode demon to Python 3.

dagmx 2y ago

Python famously has a community that does NOT adapt to changes well. See the Python 2 to 3 transition.

eigenspace 2y ago
Python's community was significantly smaller and less flushed with cash during the 2 to 3 transition. Since then there has been numerous 3.x releases that were breaking and people seem to have been sucking it up and dealing with it quietly so far. The main thing is that unlike the 2 to 3 transition, they're not breaking syntax (for the most part?), which everyone experiences and has an opinion on, they're breaking rather deep down things that for the most part only the big packages rely on so most users don't experience it much at all.
- dagmx 2y ago
  I disagree with this entire comment. The Python community consisted of tons of developers including very wealthy companies. At what point in the last few years would you even say they became “rich enough” to do the migration? Because people are STILL talking about trying to fork 2.7 into a 2.8. I also disagree with your assertion that 3.x releases have significant breaking changes. Could you point to any specific major breaking changes between 3.x releases? 2 to 3 didn’t break syntax for most code either. It largely cleaned house on sensible API defaults.
  - eigenspace 2y ago
    Fair enough. You may be totally right here, as I mentioned I don't use Python much at all since like 2017 and haven't paid it much attention in a while. I retract my comment. Regarding breakage in 3.x, all I know is that I recall several times where I did a linux system update (rolling release), and that updated my Python to a newly released version which broke various things in my system. I'm pretty sure one of these was v3.10, but I forget which others caused me problems which I could only solve by pinning Python to an older release. It's entirely possible though that no actual APIs were broken and that this was just accidentaly bugs in the release, or the packages were being naughty and relying on internals they shouldn't have relied on or something else.
    - dagmx 2y ago
      To your last point: it’s neither the language nor the packages but rather it’s the ABI. Python isn’t fully ABI stable (though it’s improved greatly) so you can’t just intermix compiled dependencies between different versions of Python. This is true for many packages in your distro as well.
      - eigenspace 2y ago
        Ah I see. Yeah, I guess I just think that for a language that's so dependent on FFI, instability in the ABI is defacto instability in the language as far as I'm concerned. But I understand that not everyone feels the same. Almost every major noteworthy Python package uses the ABI, so instability there is going to constantly be felt ecosystem wide.
      - dbsmith83 2y ago
        There have been many breaking changes throughout python 3.x releases: - standard library modules removed - zip error handling behaves differently - changes to collections module - new reserved keywords (async, await, etc.) You can argue how big of a deal it is or isn't, but there were definitely breakages that violate semantic versioning
        2y ago
Yossarrian22 2y ago
Are there communities that handle such a change well? At least that went better than Perl and Raku
- dagmx 2y ago
  Anything where the language frontend isn’t tied to the ABI compatibility of the artifacts I think. They can mix versions/editions without worry. I think it’s a larger problem with interpreted languages where all the source has to be in a single version. In that case I cant think of much.
adamc 2y ago
That was, in many ways, a crazy difficult transition. I don't think most languages have gone through such a thing. Perl tried and died. So I don't agree that it reflects poorly on the community; I think the plan itself was too ambitious.
- dagmx 2y ago
  Many languages have. There were significant breaks in C++ when stringabi changed, Swift has had major language changes, rust has editions. The difference is in what motivates getting to the other end of that transition bump and how big the bump is. That’s why it took till past 2.7’s EOL to actually get people on to 3 in a big way because they’d drag their feet if they don’t see a big enough change. Compiled languages have it easier because they don’t need to mix source between dependencies, they just have to be ABI compatible.

lanstin 2y ago

I think I am much happier to redo my personal scripts to stay at bleeding edge than to rewrite old code at work to stay in supported versions. For corporations wanton breaking changes means code that is working and has some non-zero risk to change has to have budget spent on it just to stay in place. Just this week I failed to convince a team to migrate their ten year old maintenance mode demon to Python 3.