About Python 3
alexgaynor.net
About Python 3
1–10 of 358 posts
Re: About Python 3
#2Not that this has ever been a showstopper whenever this comes up, but just to put some chips on the table, I personally have no interest generally in CPython development on 3.X, but I would pledge some help wherever I could in a potential 2.8 release.
Re: About Python 3
#3I think a really good explanation of why people are not switching was provided by Ted Dziuba: http://teddziuba.com/post/26426290981/python-3s-marketing-pr...
Re: About Python 3
#4[deleted]
Re: About Python 3
#5Something that might help is OS vendors shipping with 3.x installed, rather than 2.x most seem to.
OS X ships with 2.7.5. For a casual python user, sticking with what is there and working is safe, especially when the benefits of 3.x are unclear.
Re: About Python 3
#6I 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 hard for me to consider wholesale conversion.
I did it because I was trying to parse Unicode in XML (Apple iTunes music files) and Python 2 is completely broken when it comes to unicode.
I consider Python 3 a big "fuck you" from Guido to the community. I don't think he intended it to be so, but the effect of the long transition, and the lack of backported features in Python 2 (which could be easily accomodated), coupled with only limited adoption of Python3, demonstrate the leadership needs to pay closer attention to user pain.
Finally, I don't think Python will ever address the simple and most important core issue: lacking good multithreading support will make the language continue to be more and more marginal. CPUs aren't getting much faster, the CPython serial runtime isn't getting any faster. Multiple cores on a single chip, and multiple threads in a core, are getting more numerous- and not being able to take advantage of them using the obvious, straightforward memory-sharing, multi-threaded techniques the chips are design to run well- is just a clear ignorance of the future of computing designs.
I switched back from Python to C++ when shared_ptr and unique_ptr, along with std::map and std::vector became standard enough that programming in C++ became easy: convenient memory management, and maps/vectors are the two things that C++ adds to C that are valuable. Then I switched to Go because C++ compilation times are so bad, and writing high quality concurrent code is hard.
Re: About Python 3
#7Python 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.
Python 2.x is so huge in terms of its use around the world and available libraries and resources for it that you just can't say "hey, the new version of Python will in practice break everything" and expect it to fly.
I love Python and the community around it (and have several packages on pypi myself), but Python 3 is a joke.
If we didn't want to kid ourselves, we'd kill Python 3 and back port the interesting features, like Alex suggests. At this point though, too much effort and egos are involved to make this realistic.
Re: About Python 3
#8I 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).
Re: About Python 3
#9Python3 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 another note, why can't we port it the little goodness back to 2.7 ?
Re: About Python 3
#10Static 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.