Good riddance
Python 2 removed from Debian
51–60 of 513 posts
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me be blunt here: Python sucks, but that's at the level of 'programming languages people complain about and programming languages nobody uses'. However the Python libraries absolutely rock and the ease with which you can get really performant number crunching code out of what is nominally an interpreted language is amazing. Statistics, machine learning, engineering, the notebooks etc, I would not pick anything el…
> there isn't a single piece of code that I ever put together that worked longer than a few years out of the box without some breaking change The best practice, which prevents this issue, is to use envs, (as well as pinning your dependencies for any given project in a committable artifact). (Seems like a lot of people are using system Python, which isn't really recommended.)
Yeah, I have no problem running stuff from a decade ago because of virtual env and pip freeze (even across diff oses).
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#53print "goodbye, sweet prince" I've been slowly porting a lot of my legacy code from 2 to 3 on an as-needed basis, there's a few bits though that are just too huge/crusty/etc that they will never get ported.
Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…
It wasn’t so much the difficulty, but how little all that effort got you. It took them until about 3.7 to even reach performance parity. It was all stick no carrot.
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#54print "goodbye, sweet prince" I've been slowly porting a lot of my legacy code from 2 to 3 on an as-needed basis, there's a few bits though that are just too huge/crusty/etc that they will never get ported.
I can't even imagine what terrible hacks you had to spawn to be able to claim this.
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#55As mentioned by several people already, the migration process from 2 to 3 was really painful. It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, but introducing a breaking change with the intent that that version 2 will be deprecated has probably caused more distress overall, especially maintainers of other open source projects which rely on a specific python version. Let's never have the same kind of breaking change…
> It will be easier for the Python core maintainers, [...]
It wasn't not even that easy, to be frank. 2to3 is not a small project [1] and they had (alas, incorrectly) assumed that there were enough people to have enough tests to be benefited from 2to3, only to be found massively wrong. In hindsight no one had a good idea about language evolution; the modern concensus is a single interpreter supporting multiple parallel versions, also called "editions", but (EDIT: to my knowledge) the first major language with this approach was ECMAScript 2009 (5th ed.) with `use strict` and Python 3 predated it.
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#56Glad this is finally mostly over, but... that was bad. I wonder if the energy that had to be put into this migration by everyone involved was worth what seems to be relatively small improvements. The print-as-a-statement was ugly but convenient and didn't seem like a big deal, the integer division was something that you could live with once you knew about it (and you still need to know what the current behavior is),…
IMO you're oversimplifying things without appreciating the scope of what went into Python 3.
Core developer Brett Cannon's talk "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" goes over most of the differences at the time (2013):
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#57print "goodbye, sweet prince" I've been slowly porting a lot of my legacy code from 2 to 3 on an as-needed basis, there's a few bits though that are just too huge/crusty/etc that they will never get ported.
Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…
Probably not. Java is going through the same exact thing with Java 8 right now. The issue is that humans don't plan ahead for when the software they use inevitably goes EOL, be it programming languages, libraries, or operating systems, and so only really do so when forced (sometimes only after a security incident). In the case of Python 2 and Java 8, the problem was/has been exacerbated by the organization supporting the software continuing to push the support window out further to "give time to upgrade" because in response everyone either said "I have time, I'll get to it later" or "I'll wait for the next newest version".
For Java 8 especially, the later reason is particularly amusing, as Oracle's extended support is now slated to go to 2030 (16yrs after release, for comparison Py2.7 got 10yrs), but Java 21, the next Java LTS that should release next year, will be on Oracle's standard 8 year extended support cycle, and thus extended support only goes til 2031. So why would anyone decide, much less how would one justify to a corporate overlord, to spend all the time and resources to refactor their code, upgrade libraries (assuming the libraries themselves upgrade), update build systems, perform extensive regression testing, and everything else, just for a version that would be EOL one year after what they just upgraded from?
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#58This really sucks but at least pyenv exists. Basically distros care so little about their users we have to use external tools to use python2.
"Everyone has has a chance to migrate" . Doesn't work that way, just yesterday I spent a few hours trying to get scripts that are really good and would take me forever to migrate that are in python2 to work on an ubuntu based distro and this is with pyenv, custom venv,etc... just when you get python syntax worked out you are faced with deprecated or uselessly renamed imports and modules.
This is the shitty aspect of using foss stuff. I don't pay for it so I have to accept their decission. But in the broader sense, inability to influence things like this even with a ton of other people willing to pay for it is frustrating.
You know what would be great? If the community can vote with money pledges. So it you have 1000 people willing to donate $10/month to support python on sysv init then if volunteers don't want the money we get an external person getting paid 10k/month to support these packages even if the corporate types, developers and "devops"/sysadmin people have no use for it.
The free part of foss is expensive but I think the middle ground is to collectively pay for the support. I try very hard to avoid python2, I am not a developer and I very easily lose at least 1h/month on average to resolve these issues.
Do you all know why 2023 will not be the year of the Linux desktop? Because desktops are a commercial market and consumers/users cannot sway what the Linux desktop experience is. They either accept things as they are or pay for them by spending time reporting bugs, troubleshooting stuff, asking questions on random sites,etc... a lot of this has to do with change and maintenance requiring human time and resources. It's great when there are no issues and volunteers donate their time but it would be great to be able to pay with money also to support features or resolve issues. You can even make sure multiple people pay an equal amount to avoid wealthy people having too much or an influence but it still will not affect regular volunteer work.
I was hoping Ubuntu and Fedora would have such features.
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me be blunt here: Python sucks, but that's at the level of 'programming languages people complain about and programming languages nobody uses'. However the Python libraries absolutely rock and the ease with which you can get really performant number crunching code out of what is nominally an interpreted language is amazing. Statistics, machine learning, engineering, the notebooks etc, I would not pick anything el…
> there isn't a single piece of code that I ever put together that worked longer than a few years out of the box without some breaking change The best practice, which prevents this issue, is to use envs, (as well as pinning your dependencies for any given project in a committable artifact). (Seems like a lot of people are using system Python, which isn't really recommended.)
I started a project in 2016 and used pipenv to freeze all the dependencies. A few weeks ago, I could not get it working on a new machine. Apparently the new system python broke some of the libraries. I had also pinned the python version in pipenv, but it seems like pipenv can only install python versions that are not too old.
I really like the language, but all the tooling is seriously broken.
Re: Python 2 removed from Debian
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this say something about the language if it's been so difficult for people to migrate from 2 to 3? Yes, it was a major version change, but it doesn't bode well for arguments that Python is a good language to do long-term, maintainable, and large-scale development. Sure, now things are "settled" with 3, but Python continues to get more features. It just doesn't look good for the language if even doing a langua…
Let me be blunt here: Python sucks, but that's at the level of 'programming languages people complain about and programming languages nobody uses'. However the Python libraries absolutely rock and the ease with which you can get really performant number crunching code out of what is nominally an interpreted language is amazing. Statistics, machine learning, engineering, the notebooks etc, I would not pick anything el…
Very strange, about the whitespace. I write C++ most of the time and I love significant whitespace. I like the combination of power and (...these days, relative...) simplicity of the language for all kinds of helper tools. Probably wouldn't want to use it to write something that is large and / or needs to run fast.