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New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

asmeurer.com

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Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#31

Post by euyyn »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #24
gshulegaard wrote: post #15

Quite a nice presentation! But I just wanted to point out that the title is a bit presumptuous. I don't refuse to upgrade to Python 3, it's that the default Python for most distributions is 2 (sometimes as far back as 2.6). If you want to write a user-space tool with Python you can either require additional dependency setup, bundle a full interpreter with your package, or just write Python 2.7/6 code that is forward…

Python 3 has been available on most dists for 5-10 years.

macOS Sierra today tells me its python is 2.7

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#32

Post by chestervonwinch »

Fej wrote: post #20

Does anyone use 2.x by choice? I've only seen it required as to not break legacy code.

Yes. My reason is that I simply don't really care that much. It's the default on all my systems, so why bother putting in the effort to use something that doesn't appear to offer much advantage to me personally? I use python for my personal research, so my particularly situation affords me this laziness.

edit: I don't mean this as a knock on py3. All I'm saying is that my situation and uses for python allow me to be apathetic towards 2 vs. 3.

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#33

Post by problems »

maxerickson wrote: post #26
problems wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was source-level incompatible with older code so it couldn't be used as a smooth transition like... almost any other language upgrade I've ever seen. Breaking code like this was a big mistake in my opinion - it resulted in many people sticking on the old version for code and library compatibility. There are still libraries which don't work on Python 3, though now fairly few of them. In addition to that, the unicod…

`hex` and `fromhex` were added to the bytes type in Python 3.5. And while it isn't trivial, it is easy enough to just deal with bytes in 3.x.

Nice, do they have similar for base64 too?

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#34

Post by melling »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #24
gshulegaard wrote: post #15

Quite a nice presentation! But I just wanted to point out that the title is a bit presumptuous. I don't refuse to upgrade to Python 3, it's that the default Python for most distributions is 2 (sometimes as far back as 2.6). If you want to write a user-space tool with Python you can either require additional dependency setup, bundle a full interpreter with your package, or just write Python 2.7/6 code that is forward…

Python 3 has been available on most dists for 5-10 years.

Furthermore, Python 2.x support will expire in 3 years. It's a lot less effort to install 3.x and use it now than plan, implement, and release a 3.x upgrade in 3 years.

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#35

Post by NuSkooler »

How old is Python 3 now? I've always used Python for a "miscellaneous task" language, and still do... and even I find "...because you refuse to upgrade" a bit insulting. If I used it for something serious, even more so.

The way 2.x -> 3.x was handled is/was/will is an absolute disaster. Upgrading simple scripts is a non-issue. Larger projects seem to always be a horrible pain.

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#36

Post by bpicolo »

signet wrote: post #30

My personal favorite is native support for IP addresses, introduced in python 3.3[0]. Makes IP math and address validation so much easier. [0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/ipaddress.html

To be fair, you can grab the original. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipaddress

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#38

Post by s-phi-nl »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #24
gshulegaard wrote: post #15

Quite a nice presentation! But I just wanted to point out that the title is a bit presumptuous. I don't refuse to upgrade to Python 3, it's that the default Python for most distributions is 2 (sometimes as far back as 2.6). If you want to write a user-space tool with Python you can either require additional dependency setup, bundle a full interpreter with your package, or just write Python 2.7/6 code that is forward…

Python 3 has been available on most dists for 5-10 years.

That's true, but many users are still affected by that Python 2 remains the default. Any user can install a tool for Python 2 with pip install --user but the user might need root privileges to install a tool for Python 3 if the system administrator never intentionally installed it.

Re: New features you can't use unless you are in Python 3

#40

Post by sheepz »

problems wrote: post #13
xutopia wrote: post #4

I'm impressed how much Python seems stuck on older versions. What went wrong?

It was source-level incompatible with older code so it couldn't be used as a smooth transition like... almost any other language upgrade I've ever seen. Breaking code like this was a big mistake in my opinion - it resulted in many people sticking on the old version for code and library compatibility. There are still libraries which don't work on Python 3, though now fairly few of them. In addition to that, the unicod…

Most Python 2 codebases probably have a lot of unknown bugs in them related to Unicode. The code will work fine for cases where the inputs are ASCII, but will subtly break if unicode inputs are provided.

In term's of code reliability, Python 3's approach is much more sane.

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