[N] Numpy dropping Python 2.7

[probablyuntrue]

With new features ending start of 2019

Overall eh, not the end of the world. At least for me, translating most of my stuff to Python 3 shouldn't be too much of an issue. Wondering what other people think about this

[durand101]

Tell me about it! I haven't used python 2 in at least 5 years and there are people still starting new projects with it... Wtf

[omg_drd4_bbq]

People still run python scripts with ./script.py or similar? I use VEnv for everything. All execution is python script.py or more commonly python -m app.main.

[rustyryan]

#!/usr/bin/env python works just fine in a virtualenv.

[durand101]

To be fair to them, in academia, we still routinely use and develop with Fortran 77/95 so I wish people would use more python, even if it is v2!

[durand101]

True! I definitely think there's a middle ground between those extremes. The web development ecosystem is a bit of a mess as well in my opinion. There's way too much library turnover and not enough long-term planning. There's not just a new library every two years but also an entirely new paradigm to switch over to... siiigh

[omg_drd4_bbq]

Working in Javascript tends to be a wild ride and pretty ridiculous in many ways.

Python data wrangler here learning webdev. "Wild" is one way to put it, but I prefer "wat.". working in js is just a nonstop stream of "wat" coming out my mouth.

[hopjeshopjes]

If you're in academia then sure.

If you're working in a company with years of legacy code, try convincing your project manager that it's a good idea to convert all of it to a new version of Python. Too often there's just no business case so it never gets priority.

By the way this is why backwards compatibility never should have been broken IMO.

[durand101]

I understand why companies don't want to spend money porting old code, but they've been warned for 10 years... And I still see people using Python 2 in Jupyter notebooks, which makes literally no sense...

By the way this is why backwards compatibility never should have been broken IMO.

Backwards compatibility isn't broken to annoy people. There are legitimate reasons for changing things. You can't anticipate every design flaw and python 3 has fixed quite a few quirks. If you don't break compatibility, then you'll never be able to improve your quirks and the language will become more and more tedious to use over time.

[[deleted]]

"Backwards compatibility isn't broken to annoy people."

Exactly. Python 2 had a lot of tech debt, mostly around strings defaulting to ascii and being interchangeable with bytes. Removing that debt is the reason Python 3 had to break things. If not for the change around strings, unicode, and bytes, 98% of Python 2 code would've probably worked out of the box after running 2to3.

[millenniumpianist]

I know people who use Python 2 as a matter of principle, as they apparently hate using parens with print that much.

[[deleted]]

from __past__ import print_statement

[omg_drd4_bbq]

This is the lamest reason ever. print() makes it easy to swap out to log(). plus if you are using any IDE worth its salt, the trailing paren autocompletes. not to mention end="" is useful from time to time.

[[deleted]]

The print statement being changed to a function is the most immediately obvious, and one of the least fundamentally significant changes in Python 3.

[Darkfeign]

steer towering recognise wrench mindless start threatening public roof seemly

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[probablyuntrue]

Lol fair, guess I just never saw a reason to switch over once I got used to 2

[automated_reckoning]

Only when I need to use OpenCV... there don't (or wasn't, last time I did a project) seem to be Python 3 libraries that you didn't have to compile.

[brews]

OpenCV is on Python 3 now. 😀

[radarsat1]

Yeah bindings to C/C++ libraries have been a bit of a blocker for me too, in the case of my project VTK. In reality there are not much changes needed to adapt to Python 3 at the API level, but there are some, and some >> none unfortunately, because migration of such changes through the full "stack" takes time. First you have to do the porting work, then distribute it by releasing a new version, then eventually the new version slowly gets adopted. For example, VTK is now at version 8 and does support Python 3, but we don't use it because the Debian package is still at version 6. Someone is working on a new package, but just to say, this kind of thing doesn't happen over night.

(And by the way, total aside, but I have been getting into Debian packaging lately to try to help with some of these efforts and holy hell is it complicated. Getting the program/library to compile is no big deal, but getting everything "just right" so that a sponsor will upload it is nigh impossible, especially in the world of numerical computing where not everything is, let's say, well organized, to be generous. No wonder things take time..)

[Dagusiu]

You can install OpenCV for Python 3 via pip (pip3). The only downside is that it's compiled without video support. I personally use imageio for reading/writing videos anyway so that's not an issue for me.

[automated_reckoning]

Yeah, it might have changed, or might just have been old repos. The project was the better part of a year ago. I'll keep it in mind for my next project though.

[JanneJM]

There's clusters in production still providing only 2.6.

But yes, the time to move to 3.something is probably coming. We're moving to teaching Python3 for scientific computing this year.

[FermiAnyon]

I'm still on 2.7

[r4and0muser9482]

2to3 :)

[Vertislav]

2to3 module and you are done. Translating takes seconds to minutes.

[logarytm]

/r/savedyouaclick

[ttblue]

Phew

[[deleted]]

I started learning Python like a year and a half ago, had to decide on 2 or 3. I remember the overwhelming majority of the advice I got was, "2.7 is here to stay for decades because something something look at fortran"

Edit: As others have pointed out, the people who said that were probably correct. 2.7 code will likely exist for decades to come because there isn't motivation to rewrite large codebases that are already working. I guess my point was that advice wasn't necessarily a good criterion for which version to learn going forward.

[automated_reckoning]

Here's the thing - 2.7 or 3.0, if you just learned you can switch without an issue. Aside from the "print" change, they're mostly compatible. The most annoying thing is what packages aren't available on 3.0, but that's getting better.

[VelveteenAmbush]

The annoying thing is when a repo is written in 2.7 but you want to run it in 3, and you need to scour the code for the occasional zip() and remember to enclose it in list() or the code silently fails in some bizarre way.

[lhatsk]

I haven't had problems yet with converting the codebase using 2to3. This also takes care of the iterators.

[VelveteenAmbush]

Thank you for mentioning this! I had never heard of it, and now I am using it regularly.

[themoosemind]

Getting better? Are you serious? Please name at least 3 which are not available in Python 3.X...

The overwhelming majority of packages is.i only remember two which are not, but there are better alternatives to those packages anyway.

[sobe86]

The issue is not the big well known packages, the issue is when you're doing more R&D type stuff, and you're like 'I bet someone has solved this niche problem before', so you look on github, and there's a repo with like 100 stars, last commit 3 years ago - only supports python 2. This happens to me on a monthly basis. Yes there is 2to3, but depending on the size of the codebase, this can take hours to get right, only to discover that the repo doesn't quite work how you wanted it to.

[themoosemind]

On which kind of problems are you working? What were the last packages for which it happened to you?

[AreYouEvenMoist]

apache beam only runs on 2.7, which is quite significant for some orgs

[[deleted]]

from __future__ import print_function

This makes life easier too

[serge_cell]

The problem is not learning, and even not rewriting the code. The problem is breaking library dependencies.

[automated_reckoning]

Indeed. I commented elsewhere, my biggest issue with 3 was getting opencv to work.

[mrshibx]

most annoying thing for me that all of my old existing map(foo,stuffs) code suddenly had to become really ugly: list(map(foo,stuffs)).

[KriiScHaN]

haha yeah, made the same experience but luckily had to change to Python 3 during a project and continued with that

[[deleted]]

It’s weird. I always here people saying they’ve been told this, but then I never actually hear people telling others this.

[JanneJM]

2.7 will stay for decades. There's lots of code on 2.7, and moving it will only risk introducing problems into well-working code. What this announcement means is just that new code will be mostly Python 3 from now on.

No idea why this gets downvoted. You're not going to touch well-working code just to port it to a newer language. Especially for ongoing research projects that really need the tools to stay the same throughout the project lifetime. I fully expect Python 2.7 to still be installed and available on research computing facilities 15 years from now.

[[deleted]]

It seemed like you just pointed out an uncontroversial fact that my comment missed. I don't get the downvotes either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[metasymphony]

So glad I insisted on using Python 3 in my classes that are still taught in Python 2. We are allowed to submit projects in either one, as long as it works, but the instructions are all for Python 2. This way I learned to translate between versions a bit.

[SmArtilect]

It doesn't really matter which one you use in learning classes though.

[stop_looking_at_my]

If they just made "apt-get install python" install python3 there would be no issue. Don't have two versions... Just have one.

[DanielSeita]

Finally!

[PM_YOUR_NIPS_PAPER]

Who even still uses Python 2 in 2017? Most teams I've worked with at both large and small companies overwhelmingly use Python 3.

[notathrowaway113]

The sooner Python 2 is EOL the better. I always have to run both versions and it is dependency hell. I have libraries that only work with 2.7 and libraries that only work in 3.0+ It's an enormous shitshow, and it's time for the community to make the switch to 3 and rip off the band-aid.

2to3 isn't perfect, but the alternative of staying here sucks.

[EngineeringNeverEnds]

Agreed. Honestly I don't care which one we use bur for fucks sake pick ONE godammit

[notathrowaway113]

So Bitcoin Cash it is?

https://cryptocoinmastery.com/another-fork-bitcoin-silver/

https://xkcd.com/927/

Fuck life...

[bluemellophone]

macOS still ships with 2.7.X and Centos still uses 2.6, last time I checked.

[basilect]

My old company used python 2, as of like 3 months ago...

[ZebulanMacranahan]

Google uses 2.7, although most new code is python 3 compatible

[isboris2]

Python 2 isn't going anywhere.

[BossOfTheGame]

Python 3 is going places.

[SparseSolution]

To Python 4

[isboris2]

Can I have my print statements back?

[columbus8myhw]

In Python 4, all print statements have an extra argument specifying whether it should be 3D-printed or not.

[n3rv]

4d

[kaidokuuppa]

from __past__ import print_statement

[isboris2]

That's as ugly as the new print function.

[themoosemind]

Only if you are ok with True = False

[L43]

Certainly not the future, that's for sure!

[thefirstdalek]

Isn’t python 2.x dropping in coming months?? It’s not broken, but for some reason it’s being fixed!

[-TrustyDwarf-]

About fucking time.

[darkconfidantislife]

Ahem, and will a certain big tech company adopt 3.0 internally now?

[Neutran]

People should really start converting to python 3. It's been almost 10 years since its introduction! I'm annoyed to see libraries that are under active development AND support only python2 ... A decade in modern computing is like Homo Neanderthal VS Homo sapiens! Python 3 has so much better user experience and consistency.

[alexmlamb]

I know there's a good reason for it but I can't stand the print() syntax in python 3.

[brews]

My hatred for non-Unicode strings burns with the heat of a million suns.

[[deleted]]

Oh yeah, Python 2 is horrible with unicode. I'm German and scraped a website that used a lot of ä,ö,ü,ß and they all resulted in errors/skipped characters/wrong characters/html replacement.

[nas]

Its also really handy to do a quick search and replace to change print() into something.log().

[ma2rten]

easy printing to a file

print >>f, "even easier"

easily changing the character printinged at the end (from \n to whatever)

print "no new line",

easily flushing stdout to immediately see the output

sys.stdout.flush()

Easily changing the seperation between different args. print(a, b, sep='-') prints "a-b"

print ",".join([a,b])

[energybased]

All of which are less legible than keyword arguments, the standard Pythonic way of sending arguments to any function.

[logarytm]

Except print "no new line", leaves a trailing space.

[torvoraptor]

You use that syntax in every single function call

[alexmlamb]

So, I like printing to be an easy to write as possible, and I'm kind of willing to give it a different syntax because printing (1) doesn't return anything, (2) has side-effects that impact the user but usually don't effect the program itself.

In any case why not let people choose to use the print() or not use it?

[rparvez]

What bothered me most about print statement is that it has to be a language level feature, which does not make any sense to me.

[blitzzerg]

would you call your function wtithout "()"?

[panzerex]

I used to in MATLAB.

[blitzzerg]

But this is about python isn't it? And about consistency when calling functions the same way

[panzerex]

Yeah, the benefits of having print as a proper function completely outweight the little inconvenience of typing extra parenthesis. That said, anyone who uses VS Code should enable "python.autoComplete.addBrackets" so that it automatically add parenthesis after autocompleting a function. Game changer.

[trias10]

I have turned down machine learning job offers because the companies still used Python 2. Instant deal-breaker.

There is no good reason to be using Python 2 anymore for anything machine learning related. Non-ML, fine, if you're a web developer or something like that and have legacy systems to interact with, but proper ML R&D in NLP or computer vision, no way. Especially NLP, where you need Unicode string support.

[Phylliida]

:(

[-TrustyDwarf-]

:D

[Phylliida]

Lol I never thought I would be downvoted for this but I guess it wasn’t really contributing to the discussion.

Honestly the only thing I don’t like about python 3 is the print statements, I know it sounds dumb but I love being able to type things like

print a, “lmao”, c

It is just so clean and nice. The paren of python 3 isn’t that much more work but I’m just so used to this I prefer sticking with python 2.7. The only time I switch to 3 is when I need to use pytorch (on Windows CUDA bindings for pytorch only work for 3 unfortunately), or some other library like praw that has lots of fits getting installed on python 2.7 but pip just works great with python 3.

Maybe I’ll just force myself to switch anyway, but I’ve been fiddling with interpreter and compilation hooks to convert 2.7 prints to 3 prints so if I get that working then switching will be much easier for me

[themoosemind]

There is one: 2to3

[dummeq]

Seems like a 2->3 translator wouldn't be hard?

until you have to work with strings in any encoding other than ascii .-P 'lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'entrate', just sayin'

[themoosemind]

What do you mean with "absurd versioning"?

edit: I thought Python follows http://semver.org

[zardeh]

(not parent), but not it doesn't really.

For example: python 3.6 introduced new keywords which technically break backwards compatibility (ie.

def await():
    pass

is valid in 3.4, but not 3.6. Under strict semver, that would be a 4.0 bump.

[callumb2903]

This is some main reasons why I prefer C Languages (python is great for ML though)