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Python 3: Ten years later

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Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#51

Post by mehrdadn »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #27
iagooar wrote: post #18

As an outsider who only uses Python when I need a specific tool that's only available through pip: it's still one of my biggest nightmares. Every single time I need to install something with pip on MacOS there is this hour-long struggle with figuring out how to get the correct version of Python (2.7 vs 3) working with the correct version of pip working with the correct version of the library itself. I don't know, I g…

I use Ubuntu and it's the exact same thing for me, so I don't think it's MacOS-specific. To be honest, the whole versioning quagmire is the main reason why I don't use Python as one of my main languages, but just as an outsider like you. I like the language but I hate wasting my time with that kind of thing. Say what you will about Java, but you can just slap a jar file into a folder and it will work with the latest…

I feel like the fundamental issue is that it simply does not make sense for pip to be able to install or upgrade any Python packages managed by the system package manager, any more than it makes sense for it to upgrade the system-level Python interpreter itself. It should just outright not have the ability to do this.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#52

Post by avian »

slavik81 wrote: post #38
Latty wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except doing the right thing by default is important, and the reality is that Python 3 code is way more likely to handle Unicode correctly, which is what we want. People constantly complain, but honestly changes like Python 3 have to happen - the alternative is just another completely new language taking over instead.

I'm less enthused with the defaults than you are. How many people do you think would correctly handle foreign text in this Python 3 exercise: Write a Python 3 program that takes two arguments, reads a text file named "input.txt", replaces all instances of the first argument in the text with the second argument, and writes the result to "output.txt". For extra credit, add an option to print to stdout. My bet is very f…

Ok, I'll bite.

This is the most straightforward way I can think of to implement the program you described. I think this is more or less what someone would come up with after glancing at the Python tutorial:

https://gist.github.com/avian2/e3968bf933212ee561410b15495e6...

What is wrong with it? It works as expected with non-ASCII characters in both command-line arguments and in input.txt (Python 3.5.3 on Linux, LANG=en_US.UTF-8). Yes, it doesn't work if you have a file that's not consistent with your locale, but you can't really blame Python for that.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#53

Post by slavik81 »

avian wrote: post #52
slavik81 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less enthused with the defaults than you are. How many people do you think would correctly handle foreign text in this Python 3 exercise: Write a Python 3 program that takes two arguments, reads a text file named "input.txt", replaces all instances of the first argument in the text with the second argument, and writes the result to "output.txt". For extra credit, add an option to print to stdout. My bet is very f…

Ok, I'll bite. This is the most straightforward way I can think of to implement the program you described. I think this is more or less what someone would come up with after glancing at the Python tutorial: https://gist.github.com/avian2/e3968bf933212ee561410b15495e6... What is wrong with it? It works as expected with non-ASCII characters in both command-line arguments and in input.txt (Python 3.5.3 on Linux, LANG=en…

I saved this page from the English Wikipedia as input.txt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinz%C5%8D_Abe

    C:\Users\local\tmp>python --version
    Python 3.7.1

    C:\Users\local\tmp>python foo.py Diet Parliament
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "foo.py", line 7, in 
        text = f.read()
      File "C:\Users\local\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\encodings\
    cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
        return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8d in position 107: char
    acter maps to
Imagine I wasn't a developer who has spent dozens of hours on fixing encoding problems in Python. Imagine I'm just some person using some software I've been given and this is what I encounter. Can I actually complete my work? Is this a good user experience?

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#54

Post by tarboreus »

iagooar wrote: post #18

As an outsider who only uses Python when I need a specific tool that's only available through pip: it's still one of my biggest nightmares. Every single time I need to install something with pip on MacOS there is this hour-long struggle with figuring out how to get the correct version of Python (2.7 vs 3) working with the correct version of pip working with the correct version of the library itself. I don't know, I g…

i highly recommend pyenv to resolve this issue on Mac OS and Linux:

https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#55

Post by pritambaral »

klipt wrote: post #43
Joeboy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As in "pretty easy to introduce catastrophic errors with".

If you use the right features of C++17 errors are easier to avoid than ever. The problem is that this elegant subset of C++ is hidden inside ... the rest of C++. I guess that's the counter example to Python's 2/3 breaking change. C++ just keeps adding new features while retaining all the old ones for backwards compatibility, even if they're awkward in context of the new language.

I once read somewhere that C++ would be fine if one just used a sane subset of C++, but the challenge was agreeing on which subset.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#56

Post by monk_e_boy »

Santosh83 wrote: post #23
monk_e_boy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? I teach Python and c++ to A level students. They pick up the basics in a few weeks. C++ is pretty easy. We push our students through the c++ institute exam with few issues. Choose the right tool for the job. If you need speed, choose c

C++ is pretty easy!? Wow, that's an opinion you often don't hear. :-)

To be fair, we're not coding huge projects in it, just little toy programs.

No one seems to struggle too much though. And the things they struggle with, they would struggle regardless of the language chosen.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#57

Post by flashgordon »

iagooar wrote: post #18

As an outsider who only uses Python when I need a specific tool that's only available through pip: it's still one of my biggest nightmares. Every single time I need to install something with pip on MacOS there is this hour-long struggle with figuring out how to get the correct version of Python (2.7 vs 3) working with the correct version of pip working with the correct version of the library itself. I don't know, I g…

Out of curiosity do you use virtual environments? I had this same problem until I became very liberal with my use of virtual environments.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#58

Post by brennebeck »

tarboreus wrote: post #54
iagooar wrote: post #18

As an outsider who only uses Python when I need a specific tool that's only available through pip: it's still one of my biggest nightmares. Every single time I need to install something with pip on MacOS there is this hour-long struggle with figuring out how to get the correct version of Python (2.7 vs 3) working with the correct version of pip working with the correct version of the library itself. I don't know, I g…

i highly recommend pyenv to resolve this issue on Mac OS and Linux: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

Seconded. Pyenv has made life much better for me when using system-wide py utils.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#59

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

avian wrote: post #40
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #26

I think Python 3 primarily showed that breaking backwards incompatibility across an entire ecosystem is worse than one could have predicted. Even today Python 2 is far from dead. On the other hand the core development team "outsourced" many of the issues that people actually want to have solved to the community like packaging and distribution. Python's biggest downfall is a highly academic approach with slow release…

> Python 3's unicode model is completely outdated but was supposed to be the big feature of the version. While that was happening however the rest of the world started moving over to UTF-8. I’m not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that Python use UTF-8 encoded strings internally instead of decoded Unicode codepoints like it does currently? I’ve worked on Perl that uses that approach and it’s an absolute nightma…

> I’m not sure what you mean. Are you suggesting that Python use UTF-8 encoded strings internally instead of decoded Unicode codepoints like it does currently?

Correct. Because the current approach completely fell apart when people started using emojis. The internal encoding in too many cases is now always UCS4 which is very wasteful.

> All string operations suddenly must be aware of details of UTF encoding, which complicates even simple things immensely.

Go, Rust and Swift all show that using UTF-8 internally is not hard. Not sure why you think its hard. I have written a lot of code in those languages now and I feel much happier with their unicode support than Python's.

Re: Python 3: Ten years later

#60

Post by c8g »

iagooar wrote: post #18

As an outsider who only uses Python when I need a specific tool that's only available through pip: it's still one of my biggest nightmares. Every single time I need to install something with pip on MacOS there is this hour-long struggle with figuring out how to get the correct version of Python (2.7 vs 3) working with the correct version of pip working with the correct version of the library itself. I don't know, I g…

I always use "python -m pip install TOOL_NAME" or "python3 -m pip install TOOL_NAME".
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