71–80 of 286 posts
Python 2 was released Oct. 2000 and so will have a 20-year lifetime now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)#H...
Ruby 1.8, which was retired last year, had 10 years of life: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2013/06/30/we-retire-1-8-7...
Obviously, version numbers don't mean the same thing...and Ruby 1.8.x to Ruby 1.9.x (or even 2.x) seems less of a jump than 2.x to 3.x.
I just got back into some Python programming after a 2+ year hiatus from the language. I'm stunned that this 2.x vs 3.x debate is still happening and that 99% of all libraries in use * haven't been converted to 3.x. I like the language, but ... damn... If it weren't for the scikit/numpy stuff, I'd stick with Ruby. The Ruby community seems much less fragmented and wants to see the language move forward. It helps a lot…
Where do you get that many libraries that aren't converted? Most, at least the ones still under development, are.
As far as specifics, one of the first tasks I wanted to perform was to survey some of the NoSQL databases with some test cases that I would build in Python.
Mongo had a good 3.x driver and I worked with it. Great... but then these drivers all put me into a brick wall trying to use 3.x: couchdb, pycassa, happybase, and cql. There were numerous others that I tried along the way, but I don't have notes on all the failures.
Now, rather than trying to be 3.x pure, I don't even bother checking. I'm just using 2.7 for this project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of a small company (won't publicly shame them) that to this day is actively developing a php 4 code base. The reason is that they use a couple of libraries which do not work in php 5 and don't have the time/manpower to port it.
Automattic isn't a small company.
Python 3 didn't offer anything that would have been so useful and desirable that people would've jumped on it the moment it was released. In fact, it was actually a bit worse than Python 2 when it was out and those Python 2 users could continue enjoying loads of libraries to go with, and of course they knew how to navigate around Python 2's quirks so why bother. Sadly, this is still what I think of Python 3: "Why bother?".
Python 3 didn't have enough to warrant a 'v3', really: Python 3 could've just been Python 2.7 if it wasn't for the religious backwards compatility in Python, which, ironically seems to matter a lot. The syntactic and semantic differences weren't big enough that Guido couldn't have worked around the most important improvements into 2.x line and dropped less relevant stuff (like removing 'print' statement etc).
Even if Python 2.7 would've needed some changes to existing libraries, the psychological barrier would've been lower. It's about "Fixing my lib to work with Python 2.7 which is top of the line today" versus "Porting my lib to Python 3.0 which will be the official Python in a few years": guess which one sounds more appealing? Note that the amount of work in both cases wasn't that big.
I think mainstream Python will be 2.x till Python 4 is out.
I see many comments talking about how this will slow down the migration process. But I don't think the situation is that bad. Most of the py3 wall of superpowers is now green ( https://python3wos.appspot.com/ ) with boto, mysql-python, nltk, python-openid being some of the rare few in terms of not having great py3 alternatives. And most of these have ports on the way already. So one interesting effect of this is that…
The list is still too long.
I just got back into some Python programming after a 2+ year hiatus from the language. I'm stunned that this 2.x vs 3.x debate is still happening and that 99% of all libraries in use * haven't been converted to 3.x. I like the language, but ... damn... If it weren't for the scikit/numpy stuff, I'd stick with Ruby. The Ruby community seems much less fragmented and wants to see the language move forward. It helps a lot…
You kind of answer your question you know, the reason why Python is so fragmented wrt Ruby is precisely because it has a much larger number of uses case: scientific (numpy/scipy/panda), sysadmin, web (django, bottle, ...), games (Ren'Py, ...), etc. Ruby on the other hand is pretty much just Rails[1]. It doesn't make Ruby a bad language, but then it's a lot easier to handle the migration.
[1] Yes, Ruby can also do games and statistics, but AFAIK, it's nowhere near as much used as numpy is to Python.
How I'm not surprised. Python 3 didn't offer anything that would have been so useful and desirable that people would've jumped on it the moment it was released. In fact, it was actually a bit worse than Python 2 when it was out and those Python 2 users could continue enjoying loads of libraries to go with, and of course they knew how to navigate around Python 2's quirks so why bother. Sadly, this is still what I thin…
The Unicode switchover is where all the pain is, and it isn't particularly clear that there is a good way to do such a thing.
I still want to see a Python 2 fork getting the care it deserves. I don't trust the motivations of its current developers.
You're welcome to a refund.
I contribute back to the community and I take the time to make sure my open source code works with both Python 2 and Python 3, but I will not drink the kool-aid. Not even for upvotes on HN ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you get that many libraries that aren't converted? Most, at least the ones still under development, are.
He is not saying that 99% are not converted, he is saying the conversion rate is not 99%. E.g., the conversion rate could be 90%, or 80%, and his statement would be correct.
I see many comments talking about how this will slow down the migration process. But I don't think the situation is that bad. Most of the py3 wall of superpowers is now green ( https://python3wos.appspot.com/ ) with boto, mysql-python, nltk, python-openid being some of the rare few in terms of not having great py3 alternatives. And most of these have ports on the way already. So one interesting effect of this is that…
Also fabric, supervisor, graphite, gevent, eventlet, Twisted, etc. The list is still too long.