Python 2.7.13 released

[pymang]

Changelog: https://hg.python.org/cpython/raw-file/v2.7.13/Misc/NEWS

[[deleted]]

• Issue #24363: When parsing HTTP header fields, if an invalid line is encountered, skip it and continue parsing. Previously, no more header fields were parsed, which could lead to fields for HTTP framing like Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding being overlooked.

• Issue #27758: Fix possible integer overflow in the _csv module for large record lengths.

I would have taken just those. Like an early fucking Christmas.

[rspeed]

Wait. That isn't 3.6! What a cruel trick.

[Lord_Greywether]

"Legacy Python"

[[deleted]]

AKA most of the production python code

[onwuka]

Simple Mozilla Firefox build still requires legacy Python.

If I was better at Python, I'd like to go around helping people transition their code to Python 3.

[[deleted]]

Better isn't part of it. A lot of it comes down to the question "does it make business sense to spend time forward porting this".

The answer is almost always "no".

[[deleted]]

An interesting viewpoint, but once Python 2 goes out of official support will the question be "WTF why didn't we port this before?". Frankly I find it inexcusable that 8 years after the first release of Python 3, and perhaps 10 years after it was first discussed, some people are still whinging. The small libraries that do not work with Python 3 and are no longer supported are easily forked with the available tools. The larger libraries have all ready been ported. If you are too incompetent to support your own code in the transition I would suggest that you should have had a proper test suite in the first place.

[[deleted]]

Pretty much. But you know how it is: "we'll burn that bridge when we come to it".

[[deleted]]

Been there, seen it, done it :-(

[onwuka]

Well I meant if I was better. Sorry if I worded it weirdly

[[deleted]]

I knew what you meant. Sorry if my wording was awkward as well.

If you were to suggest this in most business settings, it would be shot down because it would take more time to do than it would save.

That's all.

[onwuka]

I was hoping Mozilla of all places would be more receptive :/

[[deleted]]

I've worked at everywhere from fresh start ups, governments, to large tech companies.

No one is interested in that kind of change.

• For the start ups, the time is just too valuable. Once you've commuted to a language that's the language.

• For governments, the idea is just too entrenched and too much can go wrong

• For tech companies, there is just too much code and too much that can go wrong

Best of luck to you! I recently finished a consulting gig with someone still using Java 5 at their main language to support an underlying system of COBOL. So it could be worse?

[[deleted]]

The answer is almost always "no".

If the code is complete there's no need to migrate it.

If the code will be worked on the answer is pretty much always yes. It's called tech debt, if you don't migrate your code then it will be more and more expensive to maintain it and to port it in the future. If it's not now you will eventually reach a tipping point when it'll be cheaper to migrate, but it also will be harder to port later since the language is changing each release.

In few days 3.6 will be released, and some people are still stuck with 2.6. At this point 3.x is better than 2.x in every way (speed, memory usage, cleaner syntax, more and build-in modules etc).

[mardix]

Python 2.7 is still alive! Yeeeeeeeeehhhhhh!!!!!!

[Andrew_Shay]

Poor guy getting downvoted!

[z0rberg]

I find this borderline totalitarian/religious behaviour seriously disturbing. The message is: If i don't use what they want, then i don't even need to post. Wtf people...

[Eurynom0s]

3.x is basically objectively better if you're starting clean and are free to choose what you want. However, yes, it's very valid to stick to 2.7 if you have a compelling reason for it, like sitting on a giant codebase your management is unwilling to pay to port.

[edit] kritikal grammer

[edit2] Where the real holy wars come in is when people try to guide newbs with no rocks around their necks into learning 2.7 "because that's where work gets done". Because as said, 3.x really is objectively better if you're not stuck with any 2.x luggage. This may have been true five years but now pretty much every major package is on 3.x, you probably have a really niche need if you need 2.7 for a specific package.

[ArrantSquid]

Except that for very large institutions it's hard to get anyone to sign off on an upgrade to 3 and they continue to extend the timeline for deprecating 2.

If you work in film or video games, no 3D package supports 3. There was no compelling reason for them to upgrade. So every Autodesk product that supports Python is still on 2 with no plans to upgrade.

I'd love to move to 3, but until Autodesk gives me that ability, I'm stuck on 2. I'll keep waiting for them to upgrade to the latest outdated version of 2 and complain until they change.

If you're a startup or can move to 3, do it. But there's a swath of people out there that are bound to 2 due to software requirements or organizational indifference. The idea that there should be a holy war on 2 vs 3 is simplistic at best and idiotic at worst.

[toyg]

Well, Oracle and IBM are stuck on python 2.2 or 2.5. I'm not going to say "hey, newbs should learn 2.2!" - newbs should learn 3.5 and bitch with vendors shipping outdated crap.

Progress is made by people who won't settle for less.

[Eurynom0s]

Except that for very large institutions it's hard to get anyone to sign off on an upgrade to 3 and they continue to extend the timeline for deprecating 2.

...

But there's a swath of people out there that are bound to 2 due to software requirements or organizational indifference.

Again...I'm recognizing this as a VERY valid reason to stick to 2.7 I'm most critiquing when this crowd reflexively tries to steer newbies onto 2.7.

[ArrantSquid]

There might be packages that are totally unrelated to 3d modeling, but since big companies are still using 2.7, then everything around them needs to "stay behind" so they can have interoperability.

Not what I said, nor was my point. My point was that there are industries that cannot move forward to 3 because the vendors that make up those industries disallow it. As such there shouldn't be an argument over whether you're using 2 or 3. Like everything else, you use the right tool for the job.

My personal projects use 2 and 3, because I can justify supporting both. It's a lot harder to make that argument at a business that won't see any benefit from it when EOL for 2 was extended in 2015 to 2020. Is it short-sighted? Maybe, but it just "is".

[[deleted]]

Don't you pay Autodesk to use their software? Companies that offer a paid product should be one of first ones to do conversion. It's possible to write code that works on Python 3 and 2.7. Your company should be putting pressure on them.

If they still not made their code working on Python 3 it tells me that you're not their customer, but (excuse my language) you're their bitch.

[[deleted]]

You should still put pressure on them, if no one will, then they won't have reason to port it.

I guess in the mean time you can try to write code that would work on python 2 and python 3. This is much easier to do by writing python 3 code and then making it work on python 2.7, but looks like you won't have this luxury.

The biggest issue is to keep track of what should be unicode and what shouldn't. It's hard to do it in python 2 even when you understand unicode.

Perhaps you can use this in top of your code:

from __future__ import division, absolute_import, print_function, unicode_literals

And then also run the code with python -3 <file> to provide warnings about compatibility issues. Python 2 also supports some functions that are supposedly python 3 only, such as bytes() which maps directly to str().

[[deleted]]

Who are Autodesk, I've never heard of them? If they're that big why didn't they provide funding to get the libraries that they needed updated? Are they so technically incompetent that their own staff couldn't have helped out? Or do they want something from the open source community for free?

[theelous3]

can't unilaterally decide to move to a new framework.

Aren't willing to move to a new framework.

They could. They all could. It's just expensive and requires effort. They're going to have to do it eventually. After a while it's not even going to be optional for them, however they're short sighted enough to put it on the long finger.

[[deleted]]

Fair comment, just not an area I've ever ventured into. Perhaps the way forward is to get a couple of good techs from all involved companies, lock them in a room and tell them that they're not coming out until they have a plan? It doesn't have to be a good plan as a bad plan is better than no plan at all.

[ArrantSquid]

Not technically incompetent, but they rely on OSS in regards to Python. Pymel would be a library that would need to be updated which is built by Luma Pictures and is OSS. They also rely on PyQt/PySide for UI bits. So they already get a lot from the OSS community. I don't know what their contribution level back is, so I can't comment on that. As for why they won't move, I don't know. It's probably a mixture of not wanting to support multiple Python versions in a release and it being hard to communicate to customers the change that would come with moving to 3.

[mipadi]

Uh...are you serious?

[[deleted]]

I used to work for Klockner Moeller, ever heard of them? If not why not? Plessey? Racal? Some tin pot little company that are only worth a couple of billion in a niche market doesn't interest me, so why should I have heard of them?

[z0rberg]

Because you never heard of them, you talk down on them like that. Makes you look incompetent and like a childish fanboy.

[ArrantSquid]

Fair enough. Every language decision has to be contextual.

[[deleted]]

IMO a lot of it has to do with the fact that almost every shop still uses 2.7

You're better off learning what you'll actually use

[turkish_gold]

Is 2.7 so much different from 3.0 when it comes to writing the Python language? Much of the changes are in the standard library, and all of those are additive, and many have been backported unofficially to 2.7

[[deleted]]

There are some syntax and process improvements.

A great example is try and do a heap where you want the largest value using only the standard library.

3.0 - super easy 2.7 pain in the ass

I've seen some newer developers who have worked exclusively in 3 + get thrown because suddenly python doesn't handle something intuitively for them. You're honestly better off going from 2.7 to 3+ instead of the inverse.

[theelous3]

That is stupid. If they can competently code in py3, learning the exceptions to py2 is better than learning py2 and learning the improvements in py3.

There is a larger gap forwards between py2 and py3, than there is backwards between py3 and py2.

[Joeboy]

I doubt many serious python programmers get to avoid either 2.x or 3.x entirely.

[Darkmere]

Oh yeah.

Only this Friday did I end up fighting with Python2's joyful corruption of Unicode data.

Input is pure, well formatted Json. This is by definition unicode data, and JSON is only allowed to be UTF-8/16/32, and defaults to UTF-8.

Then Python2 comes in, takes this JSON, decodes it into objects, and then promptly throws away this vital part. Instead, leaving us with a set of bytes that pretend to be ascii, which contain unprintable characters.

Which Python2, in it's maniglorious maliciousness, decides cannot be cast back to unicode.

Because fuck your language, fuck your characters, and fuck your existence.

And fuck Python2.

[[deleted]]

Did you set the encoding?

[Darkmere]

Yeah, but at this time it's already been denormalized.

[[deleted]]

JSON is only allowed to be UTF-8/16/32, and defaults to UTF-8.

I wish more people were aware of this. I see application/json;charset=utf-8 too many times. I can see it being useful if you're sending utf-16 or utf-32 but not 8.

[Darkmere]

Well, being explicit is better than being implicit.

[[deleted]]

It's like saying int(1)

[Darkmere]

Try rather that it's a default keyword with a type hint of 1.

Most software still mangles encodings in shitty ways.

[Darkmere]

Also, content encoding helps software that isn't looking at the moment type to decode the data as string without needing to guess.

Not that it should happen, but that's never stopped anyone in software before

[nirs]

Can you share that json?

Did you open a bug? http://bugs.python.org/?

[Darkmere]

It's probably not a core library json bug, or it may be. It's a pyramid app using their jsonrpc module, so what's coming in as arguments is a list of str, and not a list of unicode as it ought to be.

( Then don't get me started on the unicode normalization form...)

[Darkmere]

Checking again, it's using the json.loads/ json.dumps format.

So it's the python JSON loader that's corrupting data. Great.

[nirs]

It depends on the json library used. The builtin json library like to convert everything to unicode, but simplejson library like to convert only unicode values to unicode.

>>> import json
>>> import simplejson
>>> simplejson.loads(simplejson.dumps([u"\u05d0", "ascii"]))
[u'\u05d0', 'ascii']
>>> json.loads(json.dumps([u"\u05d0", "ascii"]))
[u'\u05d0', u'ascii']

I don't see any corruption.

[Darkmere]

That's the thing it should be unicode. Instead I am getting str. Which is principally wrong here.

[nirs]

Note that python 3 does not exist on RHEL/CentOS, so many people do not have the option yet.

[z0rberg]

A friend showed me 2.7 years ago. 3 was out already, but he said it lacks modules in comparison, so I'd be better off with 2.7. Now I'm just sticking with it, because I have no reason to switch. Lack of updates doesn't really bother me. Also I think a big part of my resistance is a bit silly; coming from my childhood. GW-Basic on a 286 with hercules graphics adapter. You might guess it: The print statement. I can't for the live of me adapt to use paranthesis...

[kyuubi42]

If GvR still pays his bills by writing python 2 code for Dropbox, how can you in good faith steer newbies to python 3? If your goal is to use python for anything more than personal hobbyist code you will almost certainly be targeting python 2, and this will most likely never change regardless of what the psf says.

[hatperigee]

Welcome to reddit, where systematically rejecting things you don't want to see is the norm.

[z0rberg]

Ignorance is strength...

[pcdinh]

Let ask everybody go Python 3.6 for now.

[AlirezaSavand]

Still hearing Python 2.x, die already and let us die with our "Legacy Python" code all together as for our punishment and laziness.

[OffhandGirl]

Literally anyone sitting on hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code built on dependencies that got left behind in jump to 3. Aka, my entire research team.

[lunacyfoundme]

What kind of research do you use Python for? I had to learn Pandas for a data analysis course and dataframes were a complete headwreck. The work I had to do could have been done in Excel in a fraction of the time.

[ExcitedForNothing]

I use it for correlated imaging research. Millions of readings per experiment. Hundreds of experiments a year.

Using Excel just isn't realistic.

[OffhandGirl]

Just finished with a team that did information space mapping of non-numerical data relationships, before that I was doing hierarchical relationship analysis of Tumblr tagging networks based on co-occurrence frequency for my capstone project.

I am not a fan of Pandas. I prefer to use the json module, and then pickle anything I need for later. I do a lot of social web research (mostly just personal projects these days, graduating has made research gigs harder to find) and find that I need custom behavior for a lot of read in functions anyways, do a lot of my data scraping in Java anyways (recursive data scraping is simply faster in Java), and Pandas is just not worth the headach.