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Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

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Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#41

Post by StavrosK »

Bahamut wrote: post #29
Analemma_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.

Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.

I don't know, we have a codebase of 100k loc of Python 2.7 and I migrated much of it in two or three weeks myself. I don't think the fact that companies don't spend some time drawing up a strategy is the language's problem.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#42

Post by cletus »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #27
cletus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. Python may not officially support 2.7 in 2020+. What's to stop someone else backporting security patches and necessary fixes as needed ad infinitum? I think you're underestimating just how little impetus there is to migrate from 2 to 3.

> No one told me someone had put an arbitrary countdown on the Internet. Well that's completely different. No idea what I did to deserve that tone. That site also gives a high level overview of the change, which is why I linked it. > What’s to stop someone else from backporting security fixes as needed ad infinitum? Who? I haven’t heard anyone express a willingness to take up that mantle. “Someone will probably suppo…

Sorry, I didn't mean to direct harshness at you. It's more my continued amazement at the Python 3 debacle that drove my response.

You can tell a lot about how a project is run and the people running it by their attitude to breaking changes.

Java, for example, has taken this very seriously. I mean it also explains why generics are kind of the mess they are but they didn't really have a lot of good choices here. What's more, people can compile older code with newer compilers by setting the language version.

Rust seems to be making the right noises. Since 1.0 I'm not sure if there has been any and their plan is to save those for major versions.

Perl 6... is an interesting one. Perl 5 actually had a lot of momentum but Perl 6 pretty much drove Perl into irrelevancy.

C# did make breaking changes but did it sufficiently early and they benefitted from the second mover advantage learning from Java's mistakes. IIRC C# added generics without type erasure in 2.0?

Python 3 was I think almost Python's Perl 6 moment. The only thing that probably saved Python from sliding into history was things like numpy/scipy, ML (eg pytorch), etc. Here's where the GIL doesn't really matter and Python's interface to C modules works really well.

For other applications people have (IMHO) started to move away from dynamic languages, something I personally support. The way I like to describe dynamic languages is you end up writing unit tests for spelling mistakes.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#43

Post by StavrosK »

mnd999 wrote: post #37
StavrosK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

I had to write some 2.7 the other day - a vendor supplied docker image we needed to run a script on only supported that version. Until stuff like that goes away, we’re still gonna be stuck with 2.7.

In that sense, we're still stuck with FORTRAN, but that's not indicative of the ecosystem at large.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#44

Post by zb »

beambot wrote: post #16
twerkmonsta wrote: post #10

No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism.

What would you have done differently? Frankly, it seemed pretty principled to me -- enough to where I wouldn't be comfortable Monday quarterbacking.

It is universally acknowledged that the strategy prior to 2.7/3.3 was wrong, and that this delayed the transition by several years.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#45

Post by not2b »

Bahamut wrote: post #29
Analemma_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.

Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.

My company is one of them: plenty of legacy Python and no plans to switch to 3.x that I am aware of.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#47

Post by jbay808 »

program_whiz wrote: post #14
twerkmonsta wrote: post #10

No offense to Guido, and I love Python, but the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 is a reference point for me in terms of how NOT to update a programming language. Noone should ever be attacked, but surely someone deserves some criticism.

What was your issue with the transition? Basically both are still usable, and python3 is a huge improvement over python2. I used python2.7 for years before switching and realizing python3 is strictly better, but it was nearly seamless transition (sure legacy projects might have a little pain, but how else can you make fundamental language changes?)

I like the print function style of print, but unfortunately many of the "My First Hello World in Python" tutorials available online broke when the old print was removed. Those tutorials usually don't make a point of saying they're only valid in Python 2, and of course all new users just learning a language for a first time will download the latest version to try.

For a new programmer, it can be a very discouraging experience having to debug even your first hello world program even though it perfectly matches the code in the tutorial.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#48

Post by staticassertion »

StavrosK wrote: post #21
thanatos_dem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

Most Python code being written today is almost certainly Python 2. Or at least it's close.

Google is still Py2 I believe, as is Dropbox. These are big Python shops.

I write Python. I don't see an end in sight, yet. There is, however, forward progress.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#49

Post by tannhaeuser »

thanatos_dem wrote: post #19
cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

> Here we are in 2019 with no end in sight for Python 2.7 An end is in sight, is coming soon, and it’s sort of concerning that more folks haven’t realized it yet - https://pythonclock.org/

Lots of Google stuff runs on 2.7 (eg. even recently published build scripts) and it looks like Google is going to maintain 2.7 for themselves if necessary rather than porting tons of scripts over to 3. I can't help but agree with their utilitarian approach here.

Re: Guido blames social media for his decision to abandon the supervision of Python

#50

Post by bluGill »

cletus wrote: post #18

Serious question: did anything good come out of paying attention to Twitter? Like, ever? I'm sure it has its bubble-living adherents here. Then again, so did Quora. As for the claim of "questioning [his] authority", isn't that a given? With or without social media. That's pretty much human nature. It's up to you to establish the tone and medium of how people interact with you. Linus, for example, is pretty much stric…

I disagree, the python 2-3 change goes down as one of the best breaking changes I've ever seen. A long documented timeline. The u thing is a perfect example of learning from your mistakes and fixing them.

Of course not having a breaking change is preferable, but that isn't always realistic.

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