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As someone who uses a lot of Python scripting for sys-admin automation stuff, is there anyone here on HN who could ask apple to start distributing a python3 bin

As someone who uses a lot of Python scripting for sys-admin automation stuff, is there anyone here on HN who could ask apple to start distributing a python3 binary with the OS by default? Otherwise we're going to end up with a similar situation as BASH and other utils in a few years time, where OSX comes with Python2.7.x, and everything else in the world is Python3... (Although, by 2020, apple will probably have deprecated OSX in favour of iOS, and have javascript as the only blessed scripting language...)

SEJeff 11y ago
s/javascript/swift/ :)
- deckiedan 11y ago
  Ha, yes. I kind of forgot about swift. But, remember Atwood's Law and all. Apple have invested quite a bit into JS recently, with their new LLVM JIT for Safari, I believe? (OK, by Apple standards, not much investment, but the fact that they did it at all says quite a lot...). Since they did all that work, and are committed to maintaining it now, would it not (in some way) make sense to then use the same pluggable scripting language VM into other parts of the OS, and deprecate applescript, etc?
bkeroack 11y ago
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" $ brew install python3 pypy3 (to be less pithy, it's super easy to write code that will run on both 2.7 and 3.x -- avoid print-as-statement and use format strings instead of '%' for interpolation and that will get you 95% of the way there--probably 99-100% of the way for simple automation scripts)
- Thrymr 11y ago
  > use format strings instead of '%' for interpolation To be clear, %-formatting has not gone away in Python 3: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style-string-formatting https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style...
- burntsushi 11y ago
  As the maintainer of a Python project that is 2.7 and 3.3+ compatible on the same code base, there is nothing super easy about it. It's horrific actually. Enough so that I'll never do it again. It goes far beyond just print functions. Libraries like `six` help, but the subtle differences in how Unicode handling has changed makes it a real challenge.
  - bkeroack 11y ago
    I've written a largish project (~10k lines) targeting 2.7 and another one for 3.4. Other than the new features present in Python 3 (function annotations and asyncio), my code style has not changed at all. Neither project deals directly with unicode encoding/decoding however.
    - burntsushi 11y ago
      I'm talking about the same code running on both 2.7 and 3.3+.
  - eeZi 11y ago
    A nice read: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/ http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/
    - burntsushi 11y ago
      I've read all the relevant material. That doesn't mean it isn't painful. The same author of that blog post wrote another blog post complaining about how Unicode is handled in Python 3.
- deckiedan 11y ago
  Yes, python2/3 scripts are possible, and yes, Homebrew works. However, I don't really want (if I can help it) to install homebrew on all the workstations of everyone on the team (mostly video-editing), and for personal laptops, I don't really want to add that as a requirement. I certainly don't want to turn my < 100kb of scripts into hundreds of megabytes of requirements. I'm already having to bundle an up-to-date static compiled standard rsync rather than the apple one (to cope with extended attributes across SMB mounts...). It would be really nice to not have to think the whole time "Is this compatible python2 and python3", but to just write pure python3. A lot of our scripts are to do with managing and synching all the files needed for video-editing, and other media-management utilities. I already dumped BASH (my initial attempt), as it failed or became ludicrously verbose when dealing with things like folder names starting with '-' or '*', newlines, quotation marks, tabs, or other "special" characters in file names. I don't know HOW they managed to get newlines into filenames, but our editors are creative people. I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to embed fonts and colours next. So it does involve quite a lot of string processing, our automation scripts. Our tape archival system is CentOS, our main Server is a Synology RAID, and all the main edit stations are OSX, with the possibility of adding Windows boxen in the future. And since not all our projects are in English, everything is UTF-8, and mostly 'just works'. But I don't think the transition to Python3 is going to be 100% seamless. Hopefully unittests help, but I'm sure there are cases I'll miss.
gkanapathy 11y ago
While we're at it, can we ask microsoft to start doing it too?

SEJeff 11y ago

s/javascript/swift/ :)

deckiedan 11y ago
Ha, yes. I kind of forgot about swift. But, remember Atwood's Law and all. Apple have invested quite a bit into JS recently, with their new LLVM JIT for Safari, I believe? (OK, by Apple standards, not much investment, but the fact that they did it at all says quite a lot...). Since they did all that work, and are committed to maintaining it now, would it not (in some way) make sense to then use the same pluggable scripting language VM into other parts of the OS, and deprecate applescript, etc?

bkeroack 11y ago

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" $ brew install python3 pypy3 (to be less pithy, it's super easy to write code that will run on both 2.7 and 3.x -- avoid print-as-statement and use format strings instead of '%' for interpolation and that will get you 95% of the way there--probably 99-100% of the way for simple automation scripts)

Thrymr 11y ago
> use format strings instead of '%' for interpolation To be clear, %-formatting has not gone away in Python 3: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style-string-formatting https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#printf-style...
burntsushi 11y ago
As the maintainer of a Python project that is 2.7 and 3.3+ compatible on the same code base, there is nothing super easy about it. It's horrific actually. Enough so that I'll never do it again. It goes far beyond just print functions. Libraries like `six` help, but the subtle differences in how Unicode handling has changed makes it a real challenge.
- bkeroack 11y ago
  I've written a largish project (~10k lines) targeting 2.7 and another one for 3.4. Other than the new features present in Python 3 (function annotations and asyncio), my code style has not changed at all. Neither project deals directly with unicode encoding/decoding however.
  - burntsushi 11y ago
    I'm talking about the same code running on both 2.7 and 3.3+.
- eeZi 11y ago
  A nice read: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/ http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/
  - burntsushi 11y ago
    I've read all the relevant material. That doesn't mean it isn't painful. The same author of that blog post wrote another blog post complaining about how Unicode is handled in Python 3.
deckiedan 11y ago
Yes, python2/3 scripts are possible, and yes, Homebrew works. However, I don't really want (if I can help it) to install homebrew on all the workstations of everyone on the team (mostly video-editing), and for personal laptops, I don't really want to add that as a requirement. I certainly don't want to turn my < 100kb of scripts into hundreds of megabytes of requirements. I'm already having to bundle an up-to-date static compiled standard rsync rather than the apple one (to cope with extended attributes across SMB mounts...). It would be really nice to not have to think the whole time "Is this compatible python2 and python3", but to just write pure python3. A lot of our scripts are to do with managing and synching all the files needed for video-editing, and other media-management utilities. I already dumped BASH (my initial attempt), as it failed or became ludicrously verbose when dealing with things like folder names starting with '-' or '*', newlines, quotation marks, tabs, or other "special" characters in file names. I don't know HOW they managed to get newlines into filenames, but our editors are creative people. I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to embed fonts and colours next. So it does involve quite a lot of string processing, our automation scripts. Our tape archival system is CentOS, our main Server is a Synology RAID, and all the main edit stations are OSX, with the possibility of adding Windows boxen in the future. And since not all our projects are in English, everything is UTF-8, and mostly 'just works'. But I don't think the transition to Python3 is going to be 100% seamless. Hopefully unittests help, but I'm sure there are cases I'll miss.

gkanapathy 11y ago

While we're at it, can we ask microsoft to start doing it too?