If it was so easy to do some of these things that the author wants, why hasn't someone already done it?
The Case Against Python 3
31–40 of 281 posts
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#32Pretty sure Zed's playing a joke on experienced programmes. He's clearly mentioned that the book is for complete beginners and that's why the entire section for experienced programmers is crap.
Funny how many haven't seen it and are arguing pointlessly.
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#33I didn't know Zed Shaw was that stupid. Or is he just trolling?
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#34The argument is bad but the headline has a point: the value of a language is the quality of its libraries and the community that maintains it. Python 3 seems like a mistake; it fractured the community and sent people away. (to golang, to scala, probably even to ruby).
If I were a library maintainer on py2 I would have felt betrayed by py3. Suddenly print is a function? 'yield from' won't be available on the py2 branch? Yikes.
C++ is an example of the serious negative consequences of language change. The language has been in flux for decades and the 3rd-party code shows it. Some fraction of good libraries rely on c++14 features. Many others duplicate in library code features that have been available in the language since c++11 or earlier. Boost, the 'missing standard library' for cpp, is something you either love or hate.
The end result for c++ in 2016 is that large shops either (a) don't use it or (b) don't use the new features and have a slow acceptance process for 3rd-party libs.
You can argue that the C community is healthier than C++ -- a ton of important system libraries are written in C and have bindings to tons of languages. Yes, they have problems (openssl cough), yes nobody understands unspecified behavior across compilers, but C has done a good job of supporting lots of platforms and staying relatively stable.
Betraying the community can kill a language. Perl learned this lesson the hard way. Let's hope python can be saved.
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
A programming language "is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine" [1]. This author doesn't seem to understand this concept properly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
Ditto. Then I read more for laughs. I kind of feel like I could fix py2to3 if I have a sed and awk layer in there.. maybe a fun project.
In my experience a lot of the problems with automatically converting existing Python 2 code to Python 3 code is that the Python 2 code usually makes fundamentally broken assumptions when it comes to unicode and bytes.
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#36> The fact that you can't run Python 2 and Python 3 at the same time I'm confused by this statement. I can start a python2 interpreter, background it, then start a python3 interpreter. Is there some other area that they inhibit each other in?
I think the author means that there's no single interpreter that supports both languages (a la DrRacket's #lang directive, perhaps?).
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#37This is an excellent treatise on both the value of a computer science education and the importance of being sure that things you say in public aren't verifiably false.
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
A programming language "is said to be Turing complete or computationally universal if it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine" [1]. This author doesn't seem to understand this concept properly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
And if he doesn't understand that concept should he _really_ be teaching anyone programming?
I'm pretty sure that if you understand both Turing completeness and the practice of actual programming, then you know that in most cases the one has virtually nothing to do with the other. (Which is not meant at all to imply that the author of linked article understands Turing completeness, just that even though he doesn't seem to he could still be excellent at teaching programming.)
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#39"It's sad to watch Python destroy itself because it's such a great language, but that seems to be where things are headed."
The author has a point here. I've been programming Python for about 10 years now. Really concerned about the future of the language. Languages like Node and Go are progressing rapidly, but what's happening to Python? I used to complain about Node, but with the latest ES6/ES7 improvements it's actually pretty decent. The difference in usability between npm and pip is also huge.
Python is still my favorite language, but they really need to fix this part of the ecosystem. Maybe it's time to release Python 4 that has a clean upgrade path from 2 and enough language improvements to encourage users to adopt it?
Re: The Case Against Python 3
#40> Also, it's been over a decade, maybe even multiple decades, and Python 3 still isn't above about 30% in adoption. Python 3 was released in 2008. Eight years ago.
That's also about the time Zed switched to Python.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080305002455/http://www.zedsha...