Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thank You, Guido

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 388 posts

Re: Thank You, Guido

#331

Post by merlyn »

yoavm wrote: post #204
dexen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly enough, PHP is a good example of environment that doesn't break backward compatibility much. About the only change that had a significant impact on projects I worked on was removal of the 'mysql' DB extension (replaced by 'mysqli' and 'PDO'). For an older project I created a few shim functions and it still works just fine. While frameworks come and go, the core of the language is highly backward compatib…

Can't relate with that... I'm still hosting some WordPress websites for clients from a few years ago. I'm afraid to upgrade PHP versions because many things broke in the past. True, it's not the WordPress core but the plugins that usually break, but I can't think of a single client of mine that doesn't have at least 3 plugins installed.

Ditto. I just did a project upgrading hosted websites to the latest PHP from PHP 5.6. These are already sites that vetted past the obvious issues of the mysql and mcrypt APIs going away, and these sites were all maintained in at least the last 4 years (I host sites that haven't been touched for over a decade, they aren't getting upgrades).

Even with these "cherry picked sites", we had about a 30% failure rate dealing with the new PHP. Ranging from total non-function of some random CMS, to mostly errors printing all over every page due to some deprecated or change of code behavior in the site templates.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#332

Post by tahdig »

scarface74 wrote: post #251
outworlder wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly: the Java environment is exceedingly good at that. 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.

Well, .Net Framework is analogous to Python 2.7. It will never receive anything but compatibility, security, and bug fixes going forward according to MS. The Future is .Net Core.

Just for the sake of redundancy:

Python 2.7 is not getting any kind of updates including security and bugfixes.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#333

Post by cookie_monsta »

FpUser wrote: post #226
cookie_monsta wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not a language that can be everything to everyone. Unlike say, for example...?

Nothing can be "everything to everyone". People are different. No point in trying to conquer the world.

My point exactly. It's unfair to criticise a language on the grounds that it doesn't do what no other language does.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#334

Post by sheeshkebab »

hgtr wrote: post #209
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we have multiple versions of Java at work (8 and 11) because some (pretty large) third-party components don't support the newer versions yet. Plus for things that do work there are a bunch of irritating warnings and whatnot. It's not "exceedingly good" at it, it's just alright. Go has done much better for us in this area.

Go has the whole gomodules thing, which I’m not a huge fan of. Go with vendored dependencies sounds really stable.

go mod vendor is what you are looking for then

Re: Thank You, Guido

#335

Post by nedbat »

kamyarg wrote: post #328
gus_massa wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is he retiring only from Dropbox or he is retiring also from the Python committee (or whatever it is call)?

Yeah, he already did step down from being the BDFL. PSF now has an elected steering council to replace him. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-Jul...

And Guido is currently one of the five members of the steering council.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#336

Post by musicale »

not2b wrote: post #16

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.

Python 2 to Python 3 breakage is the worst thing that ever happened to Python. Even simple things like retaining the print statement (which could certainly coexist peacefully with the print() function) would have made things easier.

It's not too late though. We could add better backward compatibility into Python 3.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#337

Post by musicale »

michalf6 wrote: post #324

I'm travelling with poor cellular connection and it took me 10 minutes to load this page, while I could load and read content on HN perfectly fine. The text content loaded LAST. That website is terrible.

Welcome to the modern web, where you need to download megabytes of largely useless crap to display 1 kilobyte of text.

We don't just need ad blocking, we need crap blocking and text caching.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#338

Post by leshow »

3pt14159 wrote: post #79
not2b wrote: post #16

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…

I think the only option there is C. It hasn't changed much for a long time, for better or worse.

Re: Thank You, Guido

#339

Post by agustif »

peterwwillis wrote: post #249
whitten wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you are referring to "technical debt", unless you were being ironic and I didn't catch your irony emoji. (Is there an ironic emoji?)

This is different. Tech debt is a factor of letting things get slowly worse. Those things can be improved if you just work on your tech debt. What I'm talking about can't be improved or fixed, or higher-ups refuse to improve or fix it. Instead, it has to be completely replaced. It's like a Replicant with a four-year lifespan. You literally know it's going to die in four years, and nobody orders a new one until the ol…

Sounds like Egyptian emperors and pyramids

Re: Thank You, Guido

#340

Post by shrimp_emoji »

ohduran wrote: post #22

I hated C++ and Matlab as an undergraduate. Hell, I hated programming as a whole - and effectively swear never to write a line of code once I was done with my BSc in Physics. Then, at work, I was introduced to Python. It was so...obvious, for lack of a better world. It was like a language I always knew that never spoke before. I'm now a software engineer, write Python almost all day, and looking back to the 18-year o…

Have you tried Ruby? It's the most "what you describe" language I've used.

I don't use it because Python's more popular and I'm a slave to fashion and critical mass, but it's so much more easy and expressive than even Python's syntax.

    for i in 0..5
I can't believe Python didn't adopt that syntax, which comes from Bash... I surmise it didn't because Python is actually something of the philosophical opposite of Ruby. In Python, there is one way to do things. You use the range() call, so we only use the range() call. In Ruby, the same thing can be done in many different ways. More expressive although a little wild.
Post reply on HN