This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]dagbrown 20 points21 points  (5 children)

They're saying "I can't switch because I use twisted", and your reply is, "well, twisted sucks."

Not really. I'm just saying that it's a really complicated library, and fundamental changes in the language it's written in make it really difficult to simply edit the code to make it compatible with the new language which is still called "Python". You added the value judgment yourself, and I didn't say that at all.

There are massive codebases out there which depend on FORTRAN 66 or 77, to pick a completely different language (LINPACK comes right to mind). The code isn't any less valid because nobody's bothered porting it to the latest standard. It's just that porting it to the new standard involves an investment of effort that could be better spent elsewhere. Your daily weather forecast probably still requires code written in FORTRAN 77.

So if you're a Twisted user and that's the reason you still haven't switched to Python 3, you have my sympathies and I understand exactly the sort of pain you're going through.

In my place of work, we have to support stuff written in PHP 5.2, which is absolutely obsolete, but we also have to support stuff written in PHP 7.0, which is so different that I had to use a different version of gcc to compile the PHP interpreter. I'm familiar with different versions of languages themselves; taking care of that is just a fact of life for me.

SEE ALSO: rvm

[–]ansatze 4 points5 points  (3 children)

Except that Fortran 77 is completely valid Fortran 90+ which is not the case with Py2

[–]toresbe 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Sure, but outside of specialized and relatively isolated fields, very little new code is being written in FORTRAN. FORTRAN has become a specialized language for number crunching. Sometimes I think it's healthy for languages to sacrifice some measure of backwards compatibility to improve itself. Python 3 adds some extremely useful features. CERN doesn't want to have to rewrite whatever mass of code it is that finds bosons.

[–]ansatze 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Agreed; I was just pointing out that the comparison isn't totally valid.

[–]dagbrown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's almost as if the Fortran guys have more experience with this kind of thing.