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Go has a compatibility promise from 2012 that they've upheld for now seven years. They are still discussing whether to change something in Go 2. https://golang.org/doc/go1compat
Fortran from the 1980s is still supported...
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What is 'even' about this, given that Dropbox was founded well before the first version of Python 3 was released? Feels like less of a 'did you notice' and more of a 'let's have an interminable python2 v python3 thread no matter the topic at hand'.
Guido has been working there for 6 years yet only now is starting the conversion?
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Fortran from the 1980s is still supported...
And yet almost no one chooses to write new Fortran code for applications. We rely on a few ancient critical widely used libraries like BLAS, accessed from non-Fortran programs.
Also for BLAS, the underlying code is usually no longer Fortran.
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> Lisp is a bad language to write an OS in Beg to differ. Lisp machines were huge, back in the day, and there are still hobbyist projects like https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
"It was done at least once" != "it was a good choice", though. There's a reason why most OSes are not written in Lisp, and it's not because the OS writers aren't smart enough to learn Lisp. It's not because they don't know it exists. It's because there are better languages to write an OS in.
Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.
I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…
The language is arguably complete and any syntactic changes you could wish upon yourself are doable in form of a library because it’s a lisp.
And all that piggybacks on top of already quite stable java ecosystem.
Can’t get much better than that.
Also highly encourage people to read the PEPs, as well as mailing list archives and interesting bugs on bugs.python.org. The PSF highly encourages backwards compatibility so that history is all there and live :)
Did you notice this: "He has already put into motion the conversion of the Dropbox server code from Python 2 to Python 3." Even the company that hired Guido is still heavily dependent on Python 2, and it doesn't surprise me at all; my own employer still has a lot of it in internal tools.
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I'm starting to long for a stack that doesn't constantly change. Just set the features and that's it. Security updates only after that. It feels like a constant grind keeping up with everything. Containers, clouds, programming languages, operating systems, frontend frameworks, transfer protocols, it seems like it takes so much effort to just build something and keep it going. That Python 2 is still around doesn't rea…
Honestly: the Java environment is exceedingly good at that. Backwards incompatible changes are truly minimal, and only those that are strictly necessary are added. And since Java 8 the language is pretty nice and offers good functional idioms. Of course, major versions of libraries still change. But there's no match with the JS approach.
I would argue that the .NET Framework is way better. The way you can have multiple versions installed side by side and have the framework pick the correct one to run is awesome. Granted, you can do something similar with the JVM by mucking around with env vars, but it's not the same thing.
> The result of this is nearly four million lines of checked Python code, nearly 200,000 improved type definitions, and countless hours saved for engineers. The more I code the more I appreciate statically typed languages. When I learned/started coding, I liked dynamically typed languages. It was easier to get past compiler. My code seemed to do something. And if there was anything wrong in the way, it would just con…
The article made it sounds like Dropbox is no longer pure 100% Python. What other languages do they use now?
Yet, most application engineers are still writing Python on the backend and TypeScript for the frontend.
[I work at Dropbox]