Well I don't think I will be able to change your opinion if you feel so strongly about it. However some pointers perhaps might make it less painful:
> 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.
That's what list() is for:
>>> list(map(lambda x: x * x, xs))
> 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.
I'm afraid I don't understand your complaint. If you're parsing binary data then Python 3 is clearly superior than Python 2:
>>> "Hello, Gådel".encode("utf-8")
b'Hello, G\xc3\xa5del'
Seems much more reasonable than:
>>> "Hello, Gådel".encode("utf-8")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)
Because they're not the same thing. Python 2 would implicitly "promote" a bytestring (the default literal) to a unicode object so long as it contained ASCII bytes. Of course this gets really tiresome and leads to Python 2's, "unicode dance." Armin seems to prefer it to the extra leg-work for correct unicode handling in Python 3 [0] however I think the trade-off is worth it and that pain will fade when the wider world catches up.
> 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.
Perhaps this is because you're a used to Python 2 and anything else is going to challenge your perceptions of the way it should work?
I don't understand the Java comparison.
> 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".
Well you can always attempt to backport these things into your own modules and keep Python 2 alive.
I think going whole-hog and embracing Python 3 is probably easier in the long run. I'm not sure how long the world is going to tolerate ASCII as the default text encoding given that its prevalence has largely been an artifact of opportunity. Unicode will eventually supplant it I have no doubt. It's good to be ahead of the curve.
[0] http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/7/2/the-updated-guide-to-unicod...