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The Case Against Python 3

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Re: The Case Against Python 3

#151

Post by flukus »

sampo wrote: post #149
flukus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what killed perl?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of perl6 was announced in 2000, and perl6 was finally published in 2015. So there was a 15 year gap when perl5 was perceived on its way to become obsolete, but perl6 was not available. I am unsure when the idea of python3 (first as python 3000) came to general knowledge, but it must have been some time between 2000 and 2004. Then python3 was published in 2008. So the time between…

I thought there was a release in the interim that broke backwards compatibility and the went back to the drawing board. But it's that long ago I might be confusing it with Netscape.

There's also a good chance I'm confusing perl and parrot.

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#152

Post by elsen »

ant6n wrote: post #109
Tomte wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the author doesn't know what he's talking about. But people talking about Turing completeness in a real programming language (usually in the form of "x is Turing complete, therefore you couldn't ask for more") almost always haven't got a clue.

True. No programming language has infinite tape.

Actually some kinda does:

"Garbage collection is simulating a computer with an infinite amount of memory". https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100809-00/?p=...

We both agree, I'm just using this as a pretext to share this intriguing piece of knowledge. I find the concept much more intuitive than "getting back unused memory".

Especially when you look at the 90% memory usage on your OS, it still make sense with the "infinite memory simulation" definition.

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#153

Post by chongli »

kbenson wrote: post #94
awinter-py wrote: post #34

The 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 branc…

A language must change, or it will be left behind, and become an esoteric toy. Even C has to deal with this. The only reason C is still popular is because of it's grandfathered status in so much of our infrastructure, and in many of the popular OS choices. A language that changes will alienate people, and lose people. Perl saw this. Python is seeing this. The way to guard against this is to keep backwards compatibili…

Even C has to deal with this.

But is there any C11 compiler out there that will refuse to compile C99?

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#154

Post by peterkelly »

The author completely misunderstands the following:

- The concept of Turing completeness

- What static typing is

- Why strings are not the same thing as byte arrays

- That the distinction between strings/bytes is a fix for a problem exists with Python 2, not something that's "broken" in Python 3.

I understand why people might still use Python 2 if they have a legacy codebase to maintain, or need certain libraries that for whatever reason have not yet been ported to Python 3. However, if you're just beginning Python programming, or starting a completely new project in the language then none of that matters - you might as well just start with latest version.

The one point he gets right is that they should have maintained backwards compatibility by allowing Python 2 modules to run on the Python 3 VM. That was a major fuckup, the implications of which should be a lesson to every language designer of what to never do. It's sad to see the developers of Angular make essentially the same mistake.

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#155

Post by lern_too_spel »

ayrx wrote: post #2

> Currently you cannot run Python 2 inside the Python 3 virtual machine. Since I cannot, that means Python 3 is not Turing Complete and should not be used by anyone. I stopped there.

Then you missed his crazy notion of what static typing is and his failure to understand the difference between a string and a byte sequence. It's incredible that someone who knows so dangerously little about Unicode has written a web server that is so popular in the Ruby community. It says something about the quality of the language's ecosystem.

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#156

Post by waterhouse »

Tomte wrote: post #10
ayrx wrote: post #2

> Currently you cannot run Python 2 inside the Python 3 virtual machine. Since I cannot, that means Python 3 is not Turing Complete and should not be used by anyone. I stopped there.

Yes, the author doesn't know what he's talking about. But people talking about Turing completeness in a real programming language (usually in the form of "x is Turing complete, therefore you couldn't ask for more") almost always haven't got a clue.

> But people talking about Turing completeness in a real programming language (usually in the form of "x is Turing complete, therefore you couldn't ask for more") almost always haven't got a clue.

There is a fun quote about that...

"There are those who tell us that any choice from among theoretically-equivalent alternatives is merely a question of taste. These are the people who bring up the Strong Church-Turing Thesis in discussions of programming languages meant for use by humans. They are malicious idiots. The only punishment which could stand a chance at reforming these miscreants into decent people would be a year or two at hard labor. And not just any kind of hard labor: specifically, carrying out long division using Roman numerals. A merciful tyrant would give these wretches the option of a firing squad. Those among these criminals against mathematics who prove unrepentant in their final hours would be asked to prove the Turing-equivalence of a spoon to a shovel as they dig their graves."

-- Stanislav Datskovskiy

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#157

Post by wyldfire »

ayrx wrote: post #2

> Currently you cannot run Python 2 inside the Python 3 virtual machine. Since I cannot, that means Python 3 is not Turing Complete and should not be used by anyone. I stopped there.

From the article:

> Python 3 has been purposefully crippled to prevent Python 2's execution alongside Python 3 for someone's professional or ideological gain.

I can't tell if Zed's referring to python3 doing a fork()/exec() of a python2 not working correctly or if he wants/expects some kind of inter-language import or "linking" among files written for respective language versions. What's he getting at?

Is there really something that prevents you from executing python2 at the same time as python3? (I tried a simple program "os.system('python3 -c \'print ("hello")\'')" and it worked just fine.

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#158

Post by bootload »

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #145
mazelife wrote: post #76

This has to be the ne plus ultra of Python scaremongering. It describes some sort of bizzaro world of a doomed language which it populates with Machiavellian Python maintainers, brainwashed developers, and a small group of heroic holdouts who see resisting Python 3 as a moral imperative. Apparently having too many string formatting options is a moral issue (three, to be specific). As someone who writes a _lot_ of Pyt…

I feel like I'm the only one who learned Python from the official site's tutorial page: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html I found it really helpful.

"I feel like I'm the only one who learned Python from the official site's tutorial page"

From Py1.52 I've done the same.

I wish every language was as well documented (Perl6 is pretty good) [0] as Py, especially the changes b/w versions. Rough order of reading: What's new, Tutorial, PEPs, Library references. Why is it good? It is canonical, pushed out as a release is done, comes with the install (cf: $ pydoc foo) and is free.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12889082

Re: The Case Against Python 3

#160

Post by rtpg »

mazelife wrote: post #76

This has to be the ne plus ultra of Python scaremongering. It describes some sort of bizzaro world of a doomed language which it populates with Machiavellian Python maintainers, brainwashed developers, and a small group of heroic holdouts who see resisting Python 3 as a moral imperative. Apparently having too many string formatting options is a moral issue (three, to be specific). As someone who writes a _lot_ of Pyt…

One major plus in the differences is that Python3 makes standard libraries always return text or bytes, instead of depending on the input to decide on the return type.

This( + no longer allowing "encoding" of bytes or "decoding" of unicode) means that you have a much higher chance of writing correct code when it comes to handling encodings.

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