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About Python 3

alexgaynor.net

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Re: About Python 3

#111

Post by steveklabnik »

dragonwriter wrote: post #97
steveklabnik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Ruby and Perl tattoos and now work at a Python (2.7) shop, so I have all of the horses in this race, but is there a significant difference between a language that's vaporware[1] and one that nobody uses? 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…

> but is there a significant difference between a language that's vaporware[1] and one that nobody uses? There's a significant difference between a language for which a complete implementation does not exist such that you cannot use it, and one for which an implementation exists but few people currently choose to use it because there is a closely-related predecessor language that still has a stronger ecosystem. As an…

Quite fair.

Re: About Python 3

#112

Post by laureny »

ghaff wrote: post #86
jshen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mags have a significant presence in enterprise these days.

Yes, Macs have a decent presence in enterprises these days--although it's easy to overstate it; Mac overall market share is still pretty low. Somewhere in the 10% percent range I believe. Furthermore. and to the original point, a lot of those Macs are BYOD or otherwise not managed as a corporate desktop/laptop. (Where I work is a case in point. You see a fair number of Macs but IT doesn't formally support them.)

> Mac overall market share is still pretty low. Somewhere in the 10% percent range I believe.

That's in the US. In the rest of the world, it's around 5%.

Re: About Python 3

#113

Post by dragonwriter »

danso wrote: post #104
themgt wrote: post #33

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…

But were the changes between 1.8 and 1.9 in Ruby as significant as 2 to 3 to Python? Or even 1.8 to 2.0? I know in Ruby 1.8.x to 1.9, some major changes in my day-to-day coding involved Hash (elimination of hash-rocket, and ordered key-value pairs by default)...but I can't think of anything off hand that required me to rewrite my own libraries. And between 1.9 and 2.0...I've been switching between machines that have…

> but I can't think of anything off hand that required me to rewrite my own libraries.

There were a lot of gems that weren't 1.9 compatible for quite a while, so there must have been something that caused people to rewrite libraries. I think that one disadvantage for Python 2->3 was an advantage Python had over Ruby -- the bigger base of libraries, many of which were widely used but basically in very-low-effort maintenance mode.

Re: About Python 3

#114

Post by erichurkman »

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?

Yeah, but one of the issues is that some very popular packages for Python were already development-dead for years.

PIL is a good example; the last actual PIL release was in 2009. We now have a great fork that works (Pillow), but PIL is not the only dead package that's still in active use. There are quite a few others, too.

Re: About Python 3

#115

Post by marcosdumay »

cool-RR wrote: post #8

I don't share Alex's concern. The migration to Python 3.X is a slow, but in my opinion sure process. Already many of my small internal programs run on Python 3.4, and I believe that in 1-2 years from now I'll be writing most new Django client projects in Python 3.4 (hopefully running on Pypy3).

I was even a bit surprized when he complained that people don't develop for Django using Python 3. There isn't even a year that Django supports it (with a year of "we support, but don't recommend"), and quite a few of its libraries already got ported.

Yep, people underestimated the time to migration. So what? I completely agree that migration is happening. Now, let's talk about IPv6...

Re: About Python 3

#116

Post by dded »

anilshanbhag wrote: post #9

Python3 is not exciting because well there is nothing to be excited about. Consider me an average programmer, I have been using python for a year+ now. Most of the everyday stuff can be done in 2.7, some functionality I need / can't do I google and get a solution which works in 2.7. Why Py3 is not adopted is because there is not much benefit you get for doing the extra work (think chemistry - activation energy) On an…

> Python3 is not exciting because well there is nothing to be excited about.

I think this depends on whether or not you use, or will ever need to use, Unicode. I don't, and so Python3 is not only not exciting, but it creates a new problem for me: suddenly, I need to think about the difference between bytes and strings. Now maybe this is healthy for me, maybe it builds character. But it also adds effort and work that bring me no benefit. I'd like to see some of the smaller improvements of Python3--I'd like print to be a function, but in the big picture I'm better off with Python2.

I wonder if the Unicode problem could be solved in a way that I wouldn't need to think about it: perhaps utf-8 everywhere somehow.

Re: About Python 3

#117

Post by seanwoods »

cturner wrote: post #10

Static platforms are great for developers. The best years of WebObjects' life were after Apple had mothballed it. Returning to a project years later - all the old code, scripts, and patterns worked just the same. Nothing else in the java world was like that. Similar story with BSD. The python 2/3 migration has been well managed. There is no rush. Celebrate it.

I think this is exactly right. Often people rush to conclusions in favor of the new and shiny, but Python is a great language that works pretty darn well at the moment, even in v2.7, giving the community the freedom to fully vet their ideas and make a valuable product.

I remember reading commentary on HN when a new version of PuTTY was released, and there was general sentiment that PuTTY is - for all intents and purposes - a "finished" product in that it does what you need it to do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758696

Python v2.7 is similar in that it's a tool that does many amazing things and is very stable. Could it be improved? Sure! But for the most part it's a great piece of software.

The care and planning that went into creating the tool is also going into the upgrade process, and I think that's a good thing.

Re: About Python 3

#119

Post by wycats »

danso wrote: post #104
themgt wrote: post #33

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…

But were the changes between 1.8 and 1.9 in Ruby as significant as 2 to 3 to Python? Or even 1.8 to 2.0? I know in Ruby 1.8.x to 1.9, some major changes in my day-to-day coding involved Hash (elimination of hash-rocket, and ordered key-value pairs by default)...but I can't think of anything off hand that required me to rewrite my own libraries. And between 1.9 and 2.0...I've been switching between machines that have…

1.8 to 1.9 was a HUGE release in terms of breaking changes. Probably the most notable change was the introduction of proper unicode support.

Unlike Python, which changed syntax at the same time, Ruby tried to maintain compatibility with existing syntax. In practice, this allowed Ruby libraries (including Rails; I did the bulk of the encoding work for Ruby 1.9 in Rails 3) to do runtime introspection to support 1.8 and 1.9 at the same time.

In my view, the best, most underrated thing that Matz did in Ruby 1.9 was to make all of the breaking changes detectable and shimmable at runtime.

Re: About Python 3

#120

Post by w1ntermute »

laureny wrote: post #112
ghaff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Macs have a decent presence in enterprises these days--although it's easy to overstate it; Mac overall market share is still pretty low. Somewhere in the 10% percent range I believe. Furthermore. and to the original point, a lot of those Macs are BYOD or otherwise not managed as a corporate desktop/laptop. (Where I work is a case in point. You see a fair number of Macs but IT doesn't formally support them.)

> Mac overall market share is still pretty low. Somewhere in the 10% percent range I believe. That's in the US. In the rest of the world, it's around 5%.

According to this site[0], it's at 7.54%. Out of that, only 32% are running the latest version of OS X (10.9). Another 24.5% are running 10.8. So almost half of OS X users are at least 2 versions behind. Not nearly as up-to-date as you might think.

0: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

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