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3 years after going EOL, and 14 years after the release of Python 3. Good riddance at long last.
The first 3.x releases were in no way good enough to replace 2.x and should not be counted like this.
And not a decade too soon. The Python 2 -> Python 3 migration will be studied for a long time as an example how not to release a new version of your language or library, right next to that Angular thingy. The number of headaches I've had to deal with because of this over the years have just about soured me on the whole Python offering, and I used to be a pretty big fan. Great that Debian finally pulls the plug on it,…
Forgive my ignorance, but what should have been done instead of the way the Python 2 to 3 migration happened? I know that Python 2 has stuck around for far longer than anyone wanted and that people were (are?) hesitant to migrate from 2 to 3, but I'm not sure what decisions contributed to that.
For us it was a change in string handling that stopped us being able to upgrade. Literally 10,000 things would have to be checked. We saw that red hat was supporting python 2 until 2025 so we decided to keep using python 2 until then. I think that once red hat stops supporting python 2 someone else will keep it running.
Python 2 still makes the world go round.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Earlier 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…
I think that's missing the point a little. The actual migration should you choose to do it was almost trivial. The official conversion script did most if not all the work. The changes were all cosmetic, like "print 42" changing to "print(42)". I'd say the uproar was about the minorness itself. The syntax had these tiny but otherwise incompatible changes, and for many people, for no good reason. Fo example it was deem…
If that were it, it'd have been over a lot sooner. For some packages, bytes vs Unicode strings was bad. For many more, layers of dependencies were an impediment. The trivial stuff wasn't the problem.
I feel like there was a batch of big software from the 90s and early 2000s that took a really long time to die, and they're not necessarily dead yet: Windows XP. Java. Python 2. IPv4. X11. Free/Open/NetBSD (1). Hell, I was using (adding new data to) a MUMPS-based system on OpenVMS until 2018. But I feel like we are seeing fewer new widely-publicized death marches now, despite many more projects starting. What changed…
Those are from the 1980s.
I feel like there was a batch of big software from the 90s and early 2000s that took a really long time to die, and they're not necessarily dead yet: Windows XP. Java. Python 2. IPv4. X11. Free/Open/NetBSD (1). Hell, I was using (adding new data to) a MUMPS-based system on OpenVMS until 2018. But I feel like we are seeing fewer new widely-publicized death marches now, despite many more projects starting. What changed…
Sorry but this is an ill informed comment. Most of the stuff you are talking about is not bad, just legacy. And what are you saying about java? How is that bad? Also poeple dont like to change shit that runs well, thats why we have so much legacy stuff around. In the real world, it doesnt matter if your whole damn business is still running their warehouse system on a DOS program running in a god damn DOS emulator on…
And as we speak, I upgrade to 3.10 only to see my dependencies break and wonder if they have learnt anything at all.
I don't think there are any breaking changes in Python 3.10? Sounds more like a package management issue.
Congratulations to Debian on upgrading to Python 3!
Glad 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),…