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About Python 3

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Re: About Python 3

#141

Post by pnathan »

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.

This is really a great point. Python 2 is stable and probably never going to die off. This implies that it can be stably and productively used without worrying about the language developers breaking it down the road. This is great. :-)

Re: About Python 3

#142

Post by Fomite »

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…

I think the concept of "activation energy" is a good one. If can get work done in 2.7. My job is not to port code - it's to get work done.

Until there's something that means I'll get work done faster using 3, there's really no reason for me to try and adopt it.

Re: About Python 3

#143

Post by laurencerowe »

falcolas wrote: post #137
marcosdumay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Debian is using Pyhon 2.7 for a while already, looks like CentOS is being quite slow.

When you consider what it is, it makes sense. It's designed for big companies that want stability, at the cost of being a few OS generations behind the bleeding edge. Fedora is moving to Python 3, so RHEL (and thus CentOS) will follow, but not for several years.

Python has been a pain on RedHat and derivatives for as long as I can remember. The problem is simply down to the decision to package only a single Python version. On Debian and derivatives you've been able to install distribution packages of multiple python versions (e.g. python2.4 and python2.7) at the same time. You lose all the advantages of a long maintained stable distribution when you have to install a bunch of hand-compiled packages.

Re: About Python 3

#144

Post by dragonwriter »

pnathan wrote: post #139
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…

Had a discussion at work a few weeks ago about this. Roughly, it came down to this - if you need any backwards compatibility whatsoever (Do you ever expect your code to ever run on machines with operating system releases younger than 2013ish OR do you ever plan to interop with code older than 2013ish), Python 2 is the way to go. Otherwise, feel free to use Python 3. This effectively means that only for purely greenfi…

> Had a discussion at work a few weeks ago about this. Roughly, it came down to this - if you need any backwards compatibility whatsoever (Do you ever expect your code to ever run on machines with operating system releases younger than 2013ish OR do you ever plan to interop with code older than 2013ish)

Python 3 runs on operating systems older than 2013 and, while it might not be the OS default, there is no reason a non-library project can't bundle its own interpreter in the distribution and use that instead of the OS default interpreter.

Re: About Python 3

#145

Post by rogerbinns »

dekhn wrote: post #131
rogerbinns wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heartily recommend using concurrent.futures. It is a standard part of Python 3.2+ - http://docs.python.org/dev/library/concurrent.futures.html - and you can get it for other Python versions - https://pypi.python.org/pypi/futures Behind the scenes it uses multiprocessing and/or threading plus queues etc. I have a function that adds command line arguments (number of workers, use threads or processes, debug mode) and…

I've been programming with import Queue, import threading, for years now (probably 8 or 9). I don't want to drop all my completely fine multithreading code for Yet Another Threading API. Personally I think multiprocessing is just dopey. Why force me to program around two different address spaces when I can just have one?

I'd also done the Queue/threading thing for the longest time. I'd also use multiprocessing some of the time. But it was arbitrary, and I'd have to make sure that shutdown, exceptions etc are correctly handled.

> Yet Another Threading API

concurrent.futures is not yet another threading api. futures is a standard async work/result wrapper, while the process and thread executors are standard executor apis.

> Personally I think multiprocessing is just dopey

Then don't use it. But be aware that it works well for many people. Some of my code scales linearly with multiprocessing and all I had to do was use a process executor instead of a thread executor.

Re: About Python 3

#146

Post by chuto »

hansjorg wrote: post #18

My last few Python projects have started out as Python 3, but ended up as 2 due to missing library support. Would it be at all feasible to enable Python 3 to import Python 2 code? I imagine this could be done without making Python 3 fully backwards compatible, but I might be wrong.

That'll be the crux. When you can run most/all existing python 2 code under python 3 we'll see the transition. Until then most of us have no plans to even look at python 3.

Re: About Python 3

#147

Post by keyme »

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…

I don't like Python 3.

Iterators everywhere are incredibly annoying, especially with my development workflow, where I don't put a line of code into a file before I run it manually in the interpreter. When I run a map over a list, I just want to see the freaking results.

Default unicode strings are obscenely annoying to me. Almost all of my code deals with binary data, parsing complex data structures, etc. The only "human readable" strings in my code are logs. Why the hell should I worry about text encoding before sending a string into a TCP socket...

The fact that the combination of words "encode" and "UTF8" appear in my code, and str.encode('hex') is no longer available, is a very good representation of why I hate Python 3.

In Python 2, the rule of thumb was "If it makes sense, it's going to work". In Python 3, this isn't true. Not often, but often enough to annoy. This makes Python "feel" like Java to me.

And worst of all, Python 3 has so many excellent features, like sub-generators, a better performing GIL, etc. These sometimes force me into coding with Python 3. I hate it every freaking time.

I said to myself that with Python 3.4, due to great stuff like the new asyncio module, I'll have to make the switch. It's really sad that this is because I "have to" do it, and not because I "want to".

Re: About Python 3

#148

Post by zackmorris »

w1ntermute wrote: post #51
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…

> You could analogize it to Apple with OS 9 -> OS 10.9, versus Microsoft with people still running XP No, you couldn't. The difference in upgrade rates between Windows and OS X is primarily due to their differing customer bases. Windows is very popular in enterprise, which avoids unnecessary upgrades in order to ensure compatibility with in-house software. OS X, however, has almost no presence in enterprise, and cons…

I just want to chime in and say that Apple has done an abysmal job with backward compatibility, and it's not just due to the enterprise vs consumer market. I would wager that if you looked at the total list of apps ever released for Mac OS, the majority of them would not run today. That's because Apple's primary strategies are 1) innovate and 2) put the user first. Putting the developer first is not part of their profit motive like it would be for say Oracle or MathWorks. So without constant recurring effort, developers and the apps they create get left behind.

Apple frequently deprecates APIs that they endorsed just a few years ago. And they claim that apps can be rewritten to work with new APIs in a few hours, when in reality it can take weeks, months or even longer due to refactoring issues. If you want to be an Apple developer, you will likely be rewriting a portion of your code at some point to run on a new OS release. I was optimistic that the practice might end but history is already repeating itself with Apple insisting on iOS 7 compliance. The kicker is that Apple could have ported a lightweight version of Mac OS to run directly on arm for iOS, but they didn't, and I disagree with it being a performance issue (iPads are orders of magnitude more powerful than NeXT machines, or even the early PowerPCs that ran OS X). They created a vast array of nearly duplicate code prefixed with UI instead of NS. This looks like more of an anachronism every day to me with tablets running at multiple GHz with GBs of ram, when the only major difference between desktop and mobile is the touch interface.

Contrast this with Microsoft, where I am finding very old examples designed for Windows XP that still run today. Now Microsoft is certainly burning its developers with the major breaks in various versions of DirectX, or subtle differences in APIs between desktop/mobile/Xbox, but in my opinion this isn't happening nearly to the extent that it is with Apple.

Re: About Python 3

#149

Post by shaneofalltrad »

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?

This is one of the issues I see that need to be corrected. I have attempts at migrating to 3, that failed miserably. One happened to be while teaching my son Python with "Python for Kids" that ended up making the experience difficult and the others that ended up causing conflicts in various OS dependencies.

I have to say, Python is my favorite language still (at least 2.7), and I hope the community can get it back in line. I can see JS, NodeJS and Python being my core technologies, but this issue with 3 is squashing my dream.

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