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Why I'm Making Python 2.8

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Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#271

Post by dagss »

smallnamespace wrote: post #269
dagss wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to change things in one part of the code base at the time -- or one feature/data field at the time, is a HUGE thing. For production systems you just cannot put the backlog on pause for a month or two while porting. You can however incrementally fix over the course of some years.

That's probably true, but unicode_literals isn't the right tool to make an incremental port, because it neither obeys good py2 nor py3 text handling conventions. It would become a substantial detour and end up being a kit more total work. Also, porting can be done in parallel to normal dev. You aim your port at a specific release while you continue fixing bugs. When the port is done, you port over all the patches. Re…

Isn't it as simple as a) do proper string handling in py2 unicode and b) if you write more u"" in a file than "", flip the switch and write "" and b"" instead?

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#272

Post by dagss »

dagss wrote: post #271
smallnamespace wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's probably true, but unicode_literals isn't the right tool to make an incremental port, because it neither obeys good py2 nor py3 text handling conventions. It would become a substantial detour and end up being a kit more total work. Also, porting can be done in parallel to normal dev. You aim your port at a specific release while you continue fixing bugs. When the port is done, you port over all the patches. Re…

Isn't it as simple as a) do proper string handling in py2 unicode and b) if you write more u"" in a file than "", flip the switch and write "" and b"" instead?

In fact first step is never use "", always use b"", I guess..

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#273

Post by minus7 »

ianamartin wrote: post #229
guitarbill wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the built in csv module needs to support a reasonable behavior. Which it does not. It could be argued that the csv module's behaviour is reasonable, and NumPy's isn't. (I'm not 100% sure about all the details of this issue) Hopefully, NumPy will change it's behaviour to match Python 3, but if not you could still use the NumPy CSV routines like `loadtxt` or `genfromtxt` [0]. So then this becomes a documentation c…

I say this as someone who uses the latest version of Python available in every new project or script. Text encoding issues are absolute garbage in Python 3.x I fucking hate the way that csv module works with text encodings. As soon as I can figure out a reliable way to take latin-1 and save it as UTF-8 without breaking everything, I will try to shoehorn in a PR. Right now, it's fucking awful. My ETL pipeline hates it…

I don't see the problem; reading and writing different encoding works fine. The CSV module makes no problems either:

  in_file = open("in.csv", 'r', encoding='latin-1')
  in_csv = csv.reader(in_file)
  out_file = open("out.csv", 'w', encoding='utf-8')
  out_csv = csv.writer(out_file)
  out_csv.writerows(row for row in in_csv)

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#274

Post by jprzybyl »

yoz-y wrote: post #20

I make software that people can write plugins for in Python. After months, years of struggle we finally dropped support for Python 2 because our small team could not bear the overhead of maintaining two bindings. We work a lot with researchers in signal processing domain and we have hard time as it is to get people to use Python 3. Please, do not put obsolete software on life support.

Obsolete is a funny word to use. In this case, it would mean that Python 2 is in good working order, but is no longer wanted. That's bound for a flame war, because:

- There is a community that wants it (largely enterprise).

- The Python team does not want it.

A less controversial word is deprecated - the Python team is discouraging use of Python 2, but not prohibiting it's use or development. That's fair, and if you read this page:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

they are not very opinionated about it, largely saying "Use 3, unless you can't, then use 2 and start trying to migrate, unless you can't, then just use 2."

I will say, not to give somebody a bad day but, 2.8 seems like a bad idea. Currently python's development has still largely been a straight line, which is good for transitioning, but 2.8 would cause a fork. It would give a lot of people a short-term win for a long-term lose. Better not to tempt people.

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#275

Post by greyman »

Nobody should believe me, but I kind of expected something like this would happen. People just wants to keep using 2.7, and let the language evolve slowly over time, as is happening with PHP, for example. So if 2.7 development was officially stopped, someone will continue with it unofficially.

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#277

Post by greyman »

lloeki wrote: post #33

> And the majority of Python code written does not run under any of the 3.x interpreters. This makes it harder for its users to be productive. What a load of bollocks. For new projects this only matters if libraries aren't ported, which they are for the most part. For old projects, either you're in a situation where you can spend time porting your code to Python 3, or you don't; but as TFA mentioned pep-404, the writ…

> What a terrible, terrible situation. Now you'll have "python" code that will neither run on 2.7 nor run compliantly on 3.x.

I don't say you are wrong, but I am afraid this situation looks "terrible" only to people who do care about 3. If someone doesn't care about it and thinks that he can survive with never porting to 3 or start using it, for those people the situation isn't that terrible...from that perspective, his 2.7 language evolved to next step, and he know that new features can be used if he upgrades from 2.7 to 2.8.

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#278

Post by antod »

susan_hall wrote: post #175
lloeki wrote: post #33

> And the majority of Python code written does not run under any of the 3.x interpreters. This makes it harder for its users to be productive. What a load of bollocks. For new projects this only matters if libraries aren't ported, which they are for the most part. For old projects, either you're in a situation where you can spend time porting your code to Python 3, or you don't; but as TFA mentioned pep-404, the writ…

I currently work for a client who has decided to shift away from PHP and towards Python. They had a monolithic PHP app with perhaps 250,000 lines of code. Now we are developing a series of Python apps in the microservices style. We've decided to develop everything as Python 2.7. We are not looking at Python 3.x. There are a few reasons. Some libraries that we want are in Python 2.7. And Amazon only supports 2.7. And…

> And we are not wild about Python 3.x's attempt to imitate a classical object oriented style.

Curious. What do you mean by that?

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#279

Post by antod »

susan_hall wrote: post #175
lloeki wrote: post #33

> And the majority of Python code written does not run under any of the 3.x interpreters. This makes it harder for its users to be productive. What a load of bollocks. For new projects this only matters if libraries aren't ported, which they are for the most part. For old projects, either you're in a situation where you can spend time porting your code to Python 3, or you don't; but as TFA mentioned pep-404, the writ…

I currently work for a client who has decided to shift away from PHP and towards Python. They had a monolithic PHP app with perhaps 250,000 lines of code. Now we are developing a series of Python apps in the microservices style. We've decided to develop everything as Python 2.7. We are not looking at Python 3.x. There are a few reasons. Some libraries that we want are in Python 2.7. And Amazon only supports 2.7. And…

> And we are not wild about Python 3.x's attempt to imitate a classical object oriented style.

Curious. What do you mean by that?

Re: Why I'm Making Python 2.8

#280

Post by int_19h »

hartator wrote: post #182
c0nfused wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is a reasonable one and is why we all support IE6 for web dev. However, at a certain point it is worth your time to move forward instead of doing nothing, you gain a little time savings now and you run into few moments of "Oh @#$%^!!" later. Real world example: You don't bother updating ssl to deal with weak DHE and suddenly chrome users can't see your payment site. My approach has always been to try to…

Except Python 3.x is bringing controversial changes and was slower than Python 2.x for several years. If IE7 was slower than IE6, you can't blame people to not move over.

All changes are controversial. In a large enough group, there's no way to make everybody happy. The question is whether the new arrangement makes more people happy long term. Judging by the rate of Python 3 adoption, it took a long time indeed, but it got there.

As for Python 2... well, there are still people signing petitions for Microsoft to bring back VB6. Last one was this year, I think.

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