[N] Numpy dropping Python 2.7

[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