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Python 2 removed from Debian

bugs.debian.org

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Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#121

Post by nibbleshifter »

groestl wrote: post #42
bmitc wrote: post #19

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…

The string/bytes encoding lead to some weird runtime problems in a codebase I maintain (the quality of which is probably not that great to begin with). Also changes in non-statically compiled languages will always be a bit tricky. In general, a comprehensive unit test suite is required to step in for the compiler, otherwise there's no confident refactoring. But python is sooooo ubiquitous it's crazy, and most code do…

The string/bytes thing is one of the issues that has been kicking my ass with older codebases.

Oftentimes there's... Bodges and hacks that made shit work that I never documented.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#122

Post by yen223 »

whirlwin wrote: post #44

As 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…

I see people saying that the migration was painful, but my own experience with two separate Python 2->3 migrations were so smooth they might as well have been a minor version bumps.

I don't know where this discrepancy comes from.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#123

Post by nibbleshifter »

erik_seaberg wrote: post #101
groestl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The string/bytes encoding lead to some weird runtime problems in a codebase I maintain (the quality of which is probably not that great to begin with). Also changes in non-statically compiled languages will always be a bit tricky. In general, a comprehensive unit test suite is required to step in for the compiler, otherwise there's no confident refactoring. But python is sooooo ubiquitous it's crazy, and most code do…

I’m pretty cautious about changing my own code, but even I am not paranoid enough to write tests to verify that freakin’ strings still have the behavior I rely on. At least not until the day they suddenly didn’t.

> At least not until the day they suddenly didn’t.

That's been happening more and more recently to me. Python 2 really was lax about letting you mix types and get shit done fast, but Python 3 is a different beast entirely. Really opinionated.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#124

Post by mrweasel »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #102
Flimm wrote: post #79

I like Python 3. It eliminated a whole category of encoding/decoding errors. Even Python 2 codebases benefited from it, as libraries were updated to handle Unicode better in an effort to achieve compatibility with Python 3. I didn't experience much pain migrating codebases to it, but I'm just speaking for myself here. Congratulations to Debian on upgrading to Python 3!

Yeah, coming from C#, Python 2's unicode support was so bad I almost abandoned it immediately as a Chinese speaker (and to make it worse, I use Windows). You literally can't use IDLE for learning/testing properly half of time due to encoding issues. And what surprised me most is that every time I mentioned this, there would be lots people telling me how this is a superior design because you can operate string like by…

We had crazy amounts of code handling unicode support and conversion from our ecommerce site to our ERP system (running on Windows using some Windows code page thing). With Python 3 all that went away, you can now just seamlessly parse text from one system to another.

For me, the unicode handling alone was worth the time spend migrating from Python 2. That was a decade ago, to finding that the "python" command still launches a Python 2.7 interpreter in 2023 is just beyond belief. Personally I feel like they should have yanked Python 2 in Jessie (Debian 8) in 2015, more realistically in Stretch in 2017.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#125

Post by erik_seaberg »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #121
groestl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The string/bytes encoding lead to some weird runtime problems in a codebase I maintain (the quality of which is probably not that great to begin with). Also changes in non-statically compiled languages will always be a bit tricky. In general, a comprehensive unit test suite is required to step in for the compiler, otherwise there's no confident refactoring. But python is sooooo ubiquitous it's crazy, and most code do…

The string/bytes thing is one of the issues that has been kicking my ass with older codebases. Oftentimes there's... Bodges and hacks that made shit work that I never documented.

As Red Green assured us, “this is only temporary … unless it works.”

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#126

Post by Stranger43 »

psychphysic wrote: post #94

2to3 really showed that Python didn't understand their audience. If they had started a new project called COBRA and just eventually had it over take python the world would be all over it. But massive breaking changes going from 2 to 3 was a disaster for their audience. Worse still you could hear the acrimony in Pythons communications on the topic.

You mean the way rakudo took over the entire perl ecosystem when it finally arrived?

I suspect a lot of the controversial decusions made doing the 2to3 migration by the python foundation was deliberately designed to avoid a situation similar to what happened to perl when the time came to cleanup some of the old cruft from the language.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#127

Post by matsemann »

pjmlp wrote: post #118

Meanwhile we are still living our Python 2 like moments in .NET and JVM ecosystems, with the huge amount of projects stuck in .NET Framework and Java 8, with no end in sight of them ever moving forward.

It's not as big of a deal, though. Code written for java8 is still source backwards compatible on newer platforms. And in .net/jvm you're not depending on some interpreter on the OS level and don't have code bundled with the OS, as has been the big issue with lots of small python scripts included in various distros.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#128

Post by mike_hock »

mrweasel wrote: post #124
thrdbndndn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, coming from C#, Python 2's unicode support was so bad I almost abandoned it immediately as a Chinese speaker (and to make it worse, I use Windows). You literally can't use IDLE for learning/testing properly half of time due to encoding issues. And what surprised me most is that every time I mentioned this, there would be lots people telling me how this is a superior design because you can operate string like by…

We had crazy amounts of code handling unicode support and conversion from our ecommerce site to our ERP system (running on Windows using some Windows code page thing). With Python 3 all that went away, you can now just seamlessly parse text from one system to another. For me, the unicode handling alone was worth the time spend migrating from Python 2. That was a decade ago, to finding that the "python" command still…

> finding that the "python" command still launches a Python 2.7

apt install python-is-python3

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#129

Post by t43562 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

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.

The best thing about significant whitespace is the reduction in pernickety code review comments about it compared to other languages. If you also agree to "just run black" to format code then that kind of bullshit drops to almost 0 in a team.

Re: Python 2 removed from Debian

#130

Post by mike_hock »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #99
p-e-w wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Python 3.3: Trust Me, It's Better than 2.7" The fact that such a talk exists shows that the improvements aren't worth the switch for most users. If they were, they wouldn't need convincing. Yes, Python 3 is (mostly) better than Python 2. No, it's not even remotely worth the amount of confusion and work it caused. If Python 3 had brought massive performance improvements, or proper support for multiple threads, then…

> The fact that such a talk exists shows that the improvements aren't worth the switch for most users. If they were, they wouldn't need convincing. That's reading far too much into a tongue in cheek presentation title. Besides, good devs are typically reasonably skeptical of new and shiny. And when you've got a large Python 2.7 codebase, and Python 3 is backwards incompatible, you'd be looking at a lot of work to upg…

> How much Python code in the wild implicitly depends on the behaviour of the GIL?

About as much as depended on Python 2-specific features?

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