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I never knew if this was a cynic's answer or truthful, but I was told by my manager at one point that RedHat's OS is superglued to python2 and spends a lot of money to keep python2 in good working order. I highly expect it's a cynic's response and please read it as such until someone in-the-know can retort my post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Versi...
RHEL 6/7 and Centos 6/7 will support Python 2 until at least mid-2024.
Because there's been not enough carrot and too much stick. The only real killer feature of Python3 is the async programming model. Unfortunately, the standard library version is numbingly complex. (Curio is far easier to follow, but doesn't appear to have a future.) On the down side, switching to Unicode strings is a major hurdle. It mostly "just works", but when it doesn't, it can be difficult to see what's going on…
I understand that this is one of the major features, but I personally never saw the appeal, given that gevent exists and in my experience works well most of the time. It also allows me to multiplex IO operations and doesn't rely on new syntax. I'm probably missing something?
So much effort wasted doing this in a large codebase. And what do you get for it? It’s just not worth it. Nobody actually needs Python 3, it was foisted on them by the developers. What everyone really wanted was Python 2.8.
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Can you describe how OOP feels tacked on? One of the major changes in Python 3 is that new-style classes are the only style of classes.
The nuisance of having to add self as parameter to every class method, no way of enforcing private methods and the mix between methods on objects and functions in the standard library. OO feels more integrated in e.g. Ruby. About some of the design decisions in Guido's own words: http://python-history.blogspot.com/2009/02/adding-support-fo...
[copying comment from an older HN thread, not speaking on behalf of any employer, opinions my own] I think many people underestimate the challenge that the 2 to 3 migration presents for large enterprises. The core issue is that even though the migration for any given module is normally really easy, the total effort required to migrate is still essentially O(n) in module count/file count, because even with current too…
The way to start a migration is to first get the 2.7 code as forward compatible as possible. Bring in the future imports. Make sure equivalent iterators are used where 3.x mandates them (xrange, iterkeys, etc.). Make sure Unicode is managed correctly on I/O. Explicitly call out truncating division. This doesn't require parallel testing. These all improve the quality of 2.x code even if you never make the leap to 3.x.…
That's why six and manual changes are always needed...
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The main change people cite is the UTF-8 "support" but frankly it seems like far more pomp and circumstance than is necessary. Appropriate code point handling could have been provided and everything left as it was. And when you get rid of that, there's not that much left that is breaking.
I find the stronger differentiation between bytes and strings leads to a lot of gotchas, like when I forget to encode bytes or pass a string where bytes are expected. I understand why it's the way it is, but when it comes the the typical unixy things I need to do shuffling of files around, tar'ing stuff, etc, it definitely trips me up more than I'd wish.
First off. Python 2.6 and 2.7 supported Unicode just fine. I had a large all-Unicode system in Python 2.6. You had to write u'word" to get a Unicode constant, and use a "unicode(s)" function here and there. Also, the part that remained "compatible" was that "str" remained an array of bytes, even though there was also a type "bytes" and a "bytearray". Early Python 3 was hell for conversion. The syntax was changed for…
It did, but in a way that chainsaws support sculpting just fine. Technically possible. Very advanced people will know how to handle it. Everybody else is just going to injure themselves randomly.
Most people writing py2 got the text/binary processing working on accident. Things appear to work until you throw actual Unicode into parameters and then nobody knows what happens. There's a number of "what does this decoding exception mean" questions on stackoverflow every day. They're often actual bugs people could ignore before. Now they're told immediately and I believe that's better.
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The way to start a migration is to first get the 2.7 code as forward compatible as possible. Bring in the future imports. Make sure equivalent iterators are used where 3.x mandates them (xrange, iterkeys, etc.). Make sure Unicode is managed correctly on I/O. Explicitly call out truncating division. This doesn't require parallel testing. These all improve the quality of 2.x code even if you never make the leap to 3.x.…
2to3 never worked and will never work "without intervention". That's why six and manual changes are always needed...
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I wonder how many people feel that migrating to Python3 would have been worth doing in the absence of being forced to do so. Dropbox invested three years of work, actually hired Python's creator, and are still not done. What are they getting out of it that they wouldn't have gotten if Python2 simply had been maintained?
This is backwards thinking. Yes, it's expensive to upgrade from Python 2 to Python 3, but it's also expensive for the Python project to maintain 2 versions of Python indefinitely. If someone wanted other than the core Python team wants to step up and maintain Python 2, they are free to do so, it's open source. But failing that, expecting the Python team to support the older/ less functional version of the code indefi…
And the alternative is cargo cult "newer is better".
>Yes, it's expensive to upgrade from Python 2 to Python 3, but it's also expensive for the Python project to maintain 2 versions of Python indefinitely.
On the other hand, they could progressively enhance upon a backwards compatible single 2 version. JS manages to do that just fine, as does Java...