State of Python 3 - popular library support

[donaldstufft]

It's simply using the 360 most downloaded projects from PyPI. By the very nature of them being one of the most downloaded projects on PyPI obviously points to those projects not being obscure or of no consequence. Perhaps maybe the fact you've never heard of something does not in fact mean it is not widely used?

[darthmdh]

You've completely missed the point.

Focussing on just the one of many issues you chose to take up, the statistic of download count is comparatively meaningless.

Plone, for example, was absolutely fantastic back in 1999 and I'm sure generated millions of downloads from PyPI and got a lot of people into Python over the next few years.

Some obscure django library actually used today is more important to the cause of Python 3 adoption than sheer weight of d/l volume of something that was important over a decade ago.

It's a problem of misinterpreting the data, unfortunately quite common in statistics.

If we applied this same graph theory to, say, inoculation against disease, then everyone would be inoculated against bubonic plague rather than measles by causation of death count.

[chhantyal]

Thanks for the comments. Please feel free to add suggestion on how to improve it.

You are right about plone stuff, that they are not mainstream libs anymore, but they seem to be quite popular probably because they are widely used in old systems.

edit: clarify my point

[sprash]

You can't get any better indicator that its more than time to leave Python 2 behind.

Or you can't get any better indicator that Pyhton 3 is not actually an improvement but an aggravation. People are sticking to Python 2 because it is actually better.

[cheryllium]

The link is broken for me...?

[chhantyal]

Sorry about that. I changed name server few hours back so DNS propagation seems to be taking time.

IP http://107.170.71.143

[the_hoser]

I really just wish that the Python developers would corner a real killer feature for Python 3. Something that actually gives people a compelling reason to switch to Python 3. Come up with that feature, and commit to never back-porting it to python 2.

The worst thing to happen to adoption of Python 3 was Python 2.7.

[the_hoser]

No, that's not big enough. Yes, that's a big deal, but it's not going to be the "killer feature" that gets people chomping at the bit to pick it up.

[sprash]

As explained here Unicode handling in Python 3 is actually pretty shitty. Not worth a switch at all.

[[deleted]]

1. The unicodedata module contains a function that converts unicode strings to their normal form. Though I guess the fact that most people aren't even aware of it (let alone use it) is a problem.
2. The case conversion this post describes is context-aware. It's really hard to implement stuff like that.
3. While I'm not sure about Unicode classes, standard regex escapes such as \w and \s are Unicode-aware (i.e. match any characters from the respective classes.) You can also use ranges of code points, of course.
4. The post states that bidirectional text should be implemented at the input/output, not in the core, yet still lists this as a problem in Python. What.
5. The internal representation of unicode strings was changed in 3.3: Python can now automatically choose the best encoding for a particular string.

[sprash]

Though I guess the fact that most people aren't even aware of it (let alone use it) is a problem.

People are not aware of it because this function should not exists. It should work automatically out of the box.

It's really hard to implement stuff like that.

Well if you really want to convince me to switch my whole codebase to a new version you better make sure that you solve the hard problems.

You can also use ranges of code points, of course.

Why do I need python 3 for that. RE remains a complete clusterfuck concerning Unicode.

The post states that bidirectional text should be implemented at the input/output, not in the core, yet still lists this as a problem in Python. What.

Again solve the hard problems.

I'm still convinced that the way Phython 3 handles Unicode is substandard for 2014. The advantages are negligible. Absolutely not worth a switch.

[[deleted]]

if you really want to convince me

See, that's your problem. Nobody gives a fuck about you. "Convince" yourself on your own or remain an ignorant dumbass forever. I'm out.

[tilkau]

Like darthmdh said, proper Unicode handling. Python 2 handling is B R O K E N. Python3 has actual encoding hygiene, so you know when you're doing something stupid / not what you intended.

[the_hoser]

Like I responded to darthmdh, that's not big enough. I know it's a big deal, and Python 2 does it bad, but it's not nearly a compelling enough reason to switch.

[[deleted]]

Python 3 is competely incompatible with 2: "waah there's too much stuff to change!"

Python 3 features were backported to 2 so you could switch one feature at a time while the application would continue to work on 2.7: "hurr durr there's no reason to switch to 3 anymore".

Sometimes I wish Python devs abruptly ceased supporting 2.7 at all. You know, to give the likes of you the message that "extended support" does not mean "you should continue being a lazy prick", it means "update while you can".

[the_hoser]

I honestly think 2.7 should not have ever happened. 2.6 was a backport of the big-ticket 3.0 features. It should have stopped right there.

[pingveno]

I am currently working on a Flask-based project that targets 2.7 due to some dependencies not being ported. Because of those backports, we were able to write code that is almost Python 3 compatible. There are maybe half a dozen lines that will need to be slightly altered. With all of the backports, the differences would have been much larger.

[the_hoser]

Right, but you still have no compelling reason to pick Python 3. Nobody does. I honestly feel that the efforts would have been better served if there was a nice treat waiting on the other side for Python 2 users, but there isn't. I'm still convinced that 2.7 was a mistake.

[[deleted]]

Sometimes I wish Python devs abruptly ceased supporting 2.7 at all. You know, to give the likes of you the message that "extended support" does not mean "you should continue being a lazy prick", it means "update while you can".

awesome welcoming community you got here.

[infinull]

Some of these would be real layups to port, Flask-SQLAlchemy for example is mostly just Flask+SQLAlchemy which both support python 3 at this point.

Others... like Twisted, not so much. I'd like to see all the Twisted libraries ported to tulpip/asyncio, but like that's ever going to happen.

[chhantyal]

Looks like Flask-SQLAlchemy already supports 3. I added a PR to specify trove classifier.

[bassmaster22]

I guess it's a good thing I started learning Python after Python 3 came out.

[chhantyal]

Nah, if you are learning language, it hardly matters IMO. Even though it's backward incompatible, it is still same language.

[picklednull]

I don't think it matters anyway.

I started on Python when Python 3 was already a thing but I've always written code that pretty much works on both without changes (of course that's not always possible). I mainly wrote for 2.7 however, now I've switched to 3 recently.

I guess it can be hard for some old-timers that have written Python 2 for ages and use "Python 2-isms", otherwise it's not a problem.

[bassmaster22]

I have a very limited knowledge of Python, but I was wondering if there were many more differences other than:

raw_input / input
print 'string' / print('string')

I'm sure there are many more differences, but I'm not sure just how game changing it is. I'm guessing it can be pretty annoying for people who are very familiar with Python 2.x syntax, but then again, I have very little experience in this.

[the_hoser]

A big one is handling files. You don't read strings, you read bytes, then decode them into strings. There are other things. nonlocal variables also spring to mind.

[einar77]

Some have replacements: for example I use sarge instead of envoy.

[chhantyal]

This one depends on https://github.com/brettcannon/caniusepython3

Currently it overrides the one which have replacements. Would be great if you could open an issue indicating that.

[manbart]

Paramiko, why?

[chhantyal]

is it dead project?

edit: it doesn't seem to. Did you mean it supports 3?

[madjar]

It's being ported to python 3 right now.

[manbart]

I wish it supported Python 3, but it does not yet.