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About Python 3

alexgaynor.net

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Re: About Python 3

#71

Post by freyrs3 »

toyg wrote: post #22
dekhn wrote: post #6

I used Python 3 for the first time a few days ago (I've been programming in Python for 18 years). When I used python heavily (I've switched back to C++ and now Go) I depended a lot on a small number of really good libraries- ElementTree, NumPy, SciPy, etc. Unless/until all of those get ported to Python 3 (along with hundreds of other programs), and those ports are considered Correct (in the QA validation sense), it's…

ElementTree has always been in 3.x. I believe NumPy and SciPy are finally making the leap just about now.

A lot of people cite that lack of NumPy support is what's keeping them from moving to Python 3, I've seen this comment more times than I can count. It seems most of them haven't done their research and found that NumPy/SciPy has had complete support for Python 3 for 4 years now.

Re: About Python 3

#72

Post by zbuc »

benburton wrote: post #11
GuiA wrote: post #7

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.

Go has broken backwards compatibility in the core libraries a few times over its short life.

Re: About Python 3

#73

Post by PaulHoule »

The funny thing is I was getting downvoted by the peanut gallery on proggit and other sites when I was pointing out, years ago, that there is no such thing as "Python", but really "Python 2" and "Python 3".

It's nice to see that pythonistas are starting to accept what an outsider saw give years ago.

Frankly the problem is a culture of overpromising and underdelivering that is endemic to Python. The situation with threading in PHP and Python is really the same: "it almost works" but the PHP community is responsible and says you shouldn't really use threads and the Python community is irresponsible and says "come in the water is fine".

The developers of languages such as PHP, C# and Java value backwards compatibility. Certainly things break from release to release, but some effort is made to minimize the effect, whereas in Python 3 they rewrote important APIs and broke a lot of stuff that they didn't have to break.

Re: About Python 3

#74

Post by JSno »

From the cases I saw(might be biased), a lot of new projects start to use Python3. These projects don't need to consider backward compatibilities. Majority of people will use python 3 in python world. Regarding Ruby, it is more elegant and consistent.And also seems Mats has clearer idea where Ruby will go. so in a long run. Ruby will catch up python in my own opinion.

Re: About Python 3

#75

Post by pron »

evmar wrote: post #23

I like to think of engineering as "solving problems within a system of constraints". In the physical world, engineering constraints are things like the amount of load a beam will bear. One of the primary easily-overlooked constraints in the software world is backwards compatibility or migration paths. There are many examples of systems where many look at them today and say: "This is terrible, I could design a better/…

Exactly. This is why something like Java 8 is admirable. They've been able to introduce two major new features from newer "productive" languages – lambdas and traits – without breaking anything; not only that, old libraries will actually enjoy better APIs thanks to the new features without recompilation. Sure, there might be better ways to implement these features, but introducing them in a way that feels natural to a language with millions of professional developers without breaking source or binary compatibility is a commendable achievement.

Re: About Python 3

#76

Post by freyrs3 »

dekhn wrote: post #6

I used Python 3 for the first time a few days ago (I've been programming in Python for 18 years). When I used python heavily (I've switched back to C++ and now Go) I depended a lot on a small number of really good libraries- ElementTree, NumPy, SciPy, etc. Unless/until all of those get ported to Python 3 (along with hundreds of other programs), and those ports are considered Correct (in the QA validation sense), it's…

Just out of curiosity, have you actually tried getting NumPy/SciPy working on Python 3? Because they've been fully supported for quite a while now. I don't understand how this myth keep perpetuating itself.

Re: About Python 3

#78

Post by cjdrake »

I develop Python code that helps automate the design of Intel CPUs (& graphics), and we recently (last week) upgraded to Python 3.3.3. Thankfully, I am less pessimistic than Alex on the subject.

Re: About Python 3

#79

Post by mkolodny »

gpvos wrote: post #65
agentultra wrote: post #39

I like Python 3. I prefer it. It is better to program in than 2.x. Iterators everywhere, no more unicode/encoding vagueness, sub-generators and more. It is a much better language and it's hard to see how it could have evolved without a clean break from its roots. However it has been interesting to follow over the last five years. It has been a sort of, "what if p5 broke the CPAN," scenario played out in real-life. Br…

Is there any serious effort to port, say, the top 1000 most popular/important packages to Python 3?

There actually is: http://python3wos.appspot.com/

A lot of those libraries have Python 3 port branches where you can help the effort. For example: https://github.com/boto/boto/tree/py3kport/py3kport

Re: About Python 3

#80

Post by itafroma »

wyuenho wrote: post #59

PHP 4 and PHP 5 weren't compatible either. How come migration was so much more successful over there than Python 2 to Python 3?

To be fair, it took about as long for PHP 5 to gain traction. PHP 5.0 was released in 2004, but it wasn't until PHP 5.2's release in 2006 that PHP 5 really became viable and PHP 4's EOL in 2008 that people started pushing for the widespread adoption of PHP 5 (via the GoPHP5 movement[1]). Arguably, it wasn't until the release of PHP 5.3 in 2009 with its namespace support that really spurred people to take a PHP 5-only approach to development.

Heck, one of the largest PHP 4 projects, Drupal, still supports a version of their product on PHP4: it will drop that support this March.[1]

[1]: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/go-php-5-go

[2]: https://groups.drupal.org/node/390343

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