211–220 of 341 posts
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I guess you haven’t looked at Swift. All 4 major versions are very incompatible.
It's still a young language and doesn't have as much legacy codebases as python.
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Well, the CGI industry had money, competent people, and 10 years to upgrade. An entire decade. And a LOT of tooling and documentation to help. I made a lot of code conversion from 2 to 3. Most of them took me a couple hours to a few days. I'm currently working on a 2.7 project that will never migrate because they literally patched the cpython runtime, but you can't freeze a whole community because some will take bad…
> Well, the CGI industry had money, competent people, and 10 years to upgrade. An entire decade. And a LOT of tooling and documentation to help. I don’t think that’s a money issue. Python 3 upgrade is not really compelling. You get slower speed - at least until recently -, tests might pass on 3.x, but documentation and edge cases still are better on 2.x, etc. While nothing is really exciting in the 3.x branch.
Sorry, have you looked at Python 3 lately? I don't think I can sum up all of the amazing work that's been done in one post (async? Cleaned up stdlib? Better errors? Not having an aneurysm from text encoding issues unraveling your whole project? New splat syntax?).
I would really encourage you to check out what's happened in the last ten years. I think you'll find many more exciting developments than you think.
This is good: - Python 2 support officially ends somewhere in 2020 - most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3 - Python 3.7 performs about as well as 2.7 with future release expected to be better Although it still took way too long, if you consider Python 3.0 was released about 10 years ago.
> most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3 I often see this but I think it's a perception from the Internet/web world. I work for CGI, all (I'm not kidding) our softwares (we have many) are 2.7. You will never see them used "on the web/Internet/forum/network" place but the day-to-day job of millions of peoples in the industry is 2.7. And we are a tiny focused industry. So I'm sure there is many other in…
The web world indeed can rapidly change their entire stack from LAMP to MEAN to Dockerized Q-Basic CGI scripts and load balance their Twitter clone. There's challenges for sure, but pushing updates is simple and quick, and you can always throw more cloud if you run into walls. If your complete platform rewrite fails, just roll the load balancer back over and try again tomorrow.
It's a lot more difficult when your Python application is communicating with a temperamental motor controller over an ancient RS-232 link with AT commands.
There are only ten of these devices in the world, and three in deployment. They perform critical functions, and they need to run 24/7 without failure or human interaction. (Did I mention these devices are remote, and it takes an afternoon to go out and investigate a failure?)
Every single failure results in a few lines of change in the code base. Those lines cost quite a bit -- both time, money, and loss. It's quite stable now, but that stability came at a price.
But haha, what am I talking about? Geez, I've had ten years to move off this "dead" platform. Let's run it through 2to3, or perhaps try a port to nodejs and deploy it tomorrow.
I think this has been the ugliest, most badly managed update for a major language since Perl6. And this is not completely over, yet. Over the next 5 years I still expect to see people complaining about this Python3 thing. I hope the designers have learned a lesson.
Perl6 isn't an update to Perl5. It's a completely unrelated language with a misleading name.
About goddamn time. Now let's take care of PHP <= 7 and Node <= 8 and us sysadmins can stop living a foot in a decade ago and a foot in today.
> Node Great! Mostly no problem. The backwards-incompatible changes are few and seem to rarely be used in the projects I've seen. > PHP Totally different story. PHP does upgrade slowly, but many of the backwards-incompatible changes are almost impossible to detect without 100% code coverage. A lot of legacy PHP That said, I think bespoke PHP is less common than people think. The WordPress/Drupal/whatever installation…
The much bigger upgrade was 4 to 5. We have something like 6 custom C extensions and that was a huge pain.
php7 is a great language though. Worth the pain.
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> Your games don't work in windows XP anymore. In fact I can play EarthSiege 2, a game from the 3.11/Win95 era, just fine on Win7 x64 with the only things not working being joystick input (I guess it does some shenanigans with the MIDI/joystick port in addition to using the windows joystick API) and the pause screen which shows your vehicle spinning around spins too fast (probably because its speed is tethered to CPU…
Whenever this comes up I feel it is worth pointing out that Linux's "Things break" approach is a problem exclusive to the userland tooling built up around the kernel. Linus takes a very hardline stance against breaking kernel ABI compatibility (except for drivers), but pretty much every piece of software outside of that, including GLIBC, thinks it's totally ok to break things all the time. It's really very sad that t…
Apples and oranges comparison.
This is good: - Python 2 support officially ends somewhere in 2020 - most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3 - Python 3.7 performs about as well as 2.7 with future release expected to be better Although it still took way too long, if you consider Python 3.0 was released about 10 years ago.
> most popular packages are now compatible with Python 3 I often see this but I think it's a perception from the Internet/web world. I work for CGI, all (I'm not kidding) our softwares (we have many) are 2.7. You will never see them used "on the web/Internet/forum/network" place but the day-to-day job of millions of peoples in the industry is 2.7. And we are a tiny focused industry. So I'm sure there is many other in…
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No that's just how IT works. Your games don't work in windows XP anymore. Actually, your USB3 mouse doesn't work on windows 7 out of the box. Centos have LTS, but still EOL. Ubuntu init system was changed to upstart. Then to systemd. Also gnome, then unity, then with new menu/notif/systray semantics, then back to gnome (but shell), and soon wayland. It breaks a lot of things. Firefox new addons don't work with some a…
2.X would still be included as an optional package, correct? I couldn’t determine that from the link, but it seems like RedHat’s practice. Or, they could install it from source. If so, 2.X users still have two years or so to migrate. That’s plenty of time in my opinion, even when all of your code is 2.X. There’s even a library for it.[1] [1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html
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Python 3.0 came out in 2008 and 3.3 came out in 2012. Are you really saying that nobody used Python3 for the first 4 years of its existence? I was certainly using 3.1 and 3.2 back then.
Pretty much yes. Some Linux distrib where still using 2.6, and not a lot of them had even 3.2 in their packages. Only a few like you and me tried it. I can't recall of any big project or lib ever supporting < 3.3.
They jumped on so early the python devs were saying "WTF are you people thinking?!?"