41–50 of 358 posts
There is no meaningful performance increase to go to a backwards incompatible version? Three letters: DOA. if not performance then at least we'd need some crazy new feature like good multi threading or perhaps running on a new relevant platform (say ios or android). Otherwise we will be 2.X forever.
There is no meaningful performance increase to go to a backwards incompatible version? Three letters: DOA. if not performance then at least we'd need some crazy new feature like good multi threading or perhaps running on a new relevant platform (say ios or android). Otherwise we will be 2.X forever.
So, Python 3's killer feature is reasonable Unicode support.
It's fascinating to compare this with ruby 1.9, released around the same time, but seemingly with a slightly better cost/benefit ratio, having nice new features and also significantly improved performance, and with ruby 1.8 being deprecated with a lot more speed and force. It got everyone to actually make the switch, and then ruby 2.0 came along, largely compatible and with a more improvements, and now ruby 2.1 seems…
I don't expect this to actually be true, but it speaks to an attitude.
* Many libraries where limited to Python 2, because the effort converting them seamed to high
* Because of minor problems (like the infamous u"-stuff), the overhead converting simple Python 2 programs was to high.
Some of the problems where fixed later (e.g. infamous u"- is now legal in Python 3 and ignored -- why not before??), but I think that than it also was a little late ... Python 3 has evolved further and many people just got into the habit to ignore Python 3.
Not caring about compatibility can be necessary, but also can be a burden (that hurts a long time)!
What is really needed is a 3to2. I have been very impressed with 2to3, the amount of work it does is pretty impressive. But as somebody who tends and prefers to work in python 3 but often needs my scripts to run in python 2, I have no choice but write those in python 2. I can see the same dilemma for somebody who writes an open source library and hope for as much usage as possible.
That wouldn't solve the main issue, which is the [non-negative] amount of work in porting existing Py2 codebases. Besides, 3to2 (which does exist but isn't maintained) and 2to3 are both bad ideas. They miss edge cases, even common ones, and they add even more complexity to the build/test/install process which people already find hard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds remarkably like Perl 5/6.
Perl 6 is vaporware. Python 3 is here, it's widely supported, it's faster than Python 2.7, and while Guido didn't do us any favors with his migration strategy, I don't see what the big deal is. Python 3.3 makes writing code that is compatible with both almost trivial. People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the s…
The previous things I've seen also indicated that Python 3 _isn't_ widely supported, though I guess Django finally got support recently, and that it _wasn't_ faster than 2.7. Is this just old information on my part, or is it different for certain kinds of workloads?
> it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu.
Yeah, that should have a large impact, for sure.
1: I have seen lots of "check out this Perl 6 code" blog posts, but I don't know to what degree it's ACTUALLY vaporware.
Something that might help is OS vendors shipping with 3.x installed, rather than 2.x most seem to. OS X ships with 2.7.5. For a casual python user, sticking with what is there and working is safe, especially when the benefits of 3.x are unclear.
OS X (at least the version on the Macbook I got from IT) also ships with a horribly outdated Bash, so I don’t think it healthy to put it up as a standard for anything…
Python 3 came from a good place, and it definitely fixes many problems that sorely needed fixing, but it was doomed to failure from the start (and many developers said that in 2008 already). For all intents and purposes, Python 3 is pretty much a new, separate programming language. Sure, it's very close to Python 2.x, but you don't have out of the box retro-compatibility so that pretty much kills it right there. Pyth…
> but you don't have out of the box retro-compatibility so that pretty much kills it right there. I don't know if that's necessarily a foregone conclusion. Scala releases aren't always/usually backwards-compatible, and you'd be hard-pressed to find people still using much older versions.
Python3 is just now becoming the default for many Linux distributions. Once that adoption took place the adoption of Python3 will increase very much. It's as simple as this. Once this milestone is hit, the remaning incompatbible libraries will see fixes for python3.