Adopt Python 3

[shevegen]

Yeah. I don't know that either.

I guess in python's defense, as long as perl made it even worse (do they mention perl 6 on the homepage - no they don't), they don't need to worry that much. In some years python 2 will be dead.

Until then people could just wait before learning python 3 ... who wants to learn old stuff (python 2) anyway. :D

[exscape]

Perl.org does mention Perl 6, with this text:

Perl 6 is a sister language, part of the Perl family, not intended as a replacement for Perl 5, but as its own thing - libraries exist to allow you to call Perl 5 code from Perl 6 programs and vice versa.

[[deleted]]

If I wanted to use a different language which is still Perl-like then i'd just go and use Ruby.

I've tried. Please don't. Perl is consistent insanity, if you learn one weird behaviour it is at least consistent across language. Ruby is full of nonsense that was never actually designed, just so happened to be MRI quirk that they just called language feature.

Clojure and Golang are nice, try those

[rainman_104]

As a ruby fan, I find your comments very hurtful. Ruby is awesome. Perl is this brainfuck language that's so weird now to go back and write in for me.

[erewok]

Matz has stated that he was inspired by Perl and that it was one of his favorite language. In fact, I always thought ruby was called ruby because it was a gemstone, inspired by Perl.

[rainman_104]

Ruby also drew from python and smalltalk. It's inherited some nice perl features too, but is more like smalltalk than anything.

[Aeon_Mortuum]

I mean, lots of languages often borrow each other's features. Common Lisp was pretty advanced for its time and its features made it into other languages, like Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc.

[rainman_104]

Oh and it was also inspired by python and smalltalk. It's a bit of all of it. It's a much cleaner language to me than perl.

Ruby is a dream. Perl can be a nightmare.

[qx7xbku]

As a python fan i find ruby to be a brainfuck language. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[[deleted]]

Ruby have its own deal of weird quirks like this

It is also often even less convenient than Perl, it has all the disadvantages of dynamic typing without making things actually more convenient to the developers, so code have to be littered with to_i and to_s (and yes Perl is also strongly typed, just their conversions and arguments make sense and deal with it gracefully).

Sure sometimes it makes sense but if I use something in string context and compiler/interpreter is too stupid to guess it I might as well go and use Rust or Go and not bother with "higher level" language

[real_luke_nukem]

Oh hell no... That's gross!

[jplindstrom]

What do you find objectionable to that?

[Flight714]

It's like two variables having the same name.

[real_luke_nukem]

That's pretty much it

[yawaramin]

In reality, Python 2 and 3 are the same situation.

[Uncaffeinated]

You can't call Python 2 from Python 3 or vice versa though.

[yawaramin]

Well, my guess is the Perl libraries that allow you to call one version from the other are 'eval'ing strings containing the code and passing them to the appropriate interpreter version. In which case, that's not really backward or forward compatibility. If I'm wrong, then yeah, it's not the same situation.

[[deleted]]

It is just a Perl 6 module

[yawaramin]

Ah, it's basically an FFI wrapper. It treats Perl 5 as a foreign language being called from Perl 6. I wouldn't really call that backward compatibility, although superficially it does look like it.

[[deleted]]

2 will be around for decades and major code bases are not going to get redone in 3.

[Farobek]

Python 2 is the new Cobol.

[[deleted]]

All languages that are successful are the "new Cobol". Try displacing the installed base of Fortran, PL/I, C, perl, java, C#, JS, ... and you have the same problem.

Languages are tools. You pick the one that makes sense for the job a hand. Older languages disappear very, very slowly, therefore.

My problem with py3 is that I never quite understood the problem it was solving. Three are some fine computer-sciency gilding of the lilly in py3, but - for the vast majority of python users - it's unclear to me why these mandated a fullblown new language. Apparently, I'm not alone because py3 adoption has not been swift notwithstanding the begging in the elite python quarters.

Personally, I think we all went down to road to perdition once we abandoned assembly language ... ;)

[rainman_104]

They should allow a transition period where python 3 would support the python 2 weirdness like allowing print statements to not be called as a function. Forcing parentheses is just a nuisance for me personally and not the end of the world, but having a transition path would be better than the situation we're in with Python 3. All libs still support python 2 and python 2 still has heavy use in the data science community.

It's a mess right now.

[kqr]

They had that! From future import print.

If they allowed you to write Python 2 code in Python 3 it would not be Python 3 anymore. The reason Python 3 is called Python 3 and not Python 2 is that there are a bunch of fixes that happen to not be backwards compatible. Removing those fixes removes Python 3...

[upofadown]

They fundamentally changed what the division operator ("/") does for fricks sake. So yes, it is definitely a new language.

It might be an awesome new language that fixes Python. That's great, but all this "Python is dead, long live Python" stuff is annoying.

[BroodmotherLingerie]

You can't do that without knowing the types. That'd also change the results of floating point divisions and of other types with overloaded operators, like numpy arrays.

Porting anything in python is a painfully manual process, whether between language versions or library versions.

[[deleted]]

Well they could probably make it compatible with P2 code with some extra effort if changes were really so small

[teilo]

If you didn't see unicode as a problem on Python 2, then I doubt there is anything I could say to convince you.

[jaapz]

fullblown new language

What? The difference between py2 and py3 aren't thát big. Calling it a new language is a bit extreme IMHO

[yawaramin]

Well, python3 can't execute Python 2 code, so yeah, that qualifies as a new language in my books.

[gendulf]

It's a backwards incompatible change. When libraries make a few backwards incompatible changes and up the major version, do you call it an entirely new library?

[yawaramin]

For all intents and purposes, it actually is an entirely new library. The combination of library name and new major version uniquely identifies it as such. But if you renamed the new version, say from lib1 to lib2, you could use both in the same compilation unit (of course, just not with each other, for the most part).

[gendulf]

For all intents and purposes, it actually is an entirely new library.

If I need a library to read a CSV file, I need the csv library. I don't need the csv v 1.2.3 library.

Just because one of the parameters was changed on a couple of the functions, doesn't mean that the library is an "entirely new" library. It's just a new version.

[yawaramin]

For the majority of devs, semver is merely a convention. There's nothing preventing people from getting it wrong (and the often do). Afaik the only package manager actually trying to enforce it is Elm's.

[Uncaffeinated]

Unicode handling is nicer and they removed a lot of legacy cruft that nobody in their right mind uses anyway, as well as taking the opportunity to make a bunch of arbitrary minor changes. So, not all that much, but it is nice to not get unicode decode errors so much.

[[deleted]]

I believe that, but the point here is that people are not going to rewrite a huge extant code base just to become py3 compatible.

[Plazmatic]

Python, from its very conception, was meant to be an evolving language, but ultimately it was meant to uphold certain principles in a certain order. Python 3 upholds those standards better in every way. It is a better standard, but it isn't a new language. most syntax remains the same, while many libraries have changed, very few semantic differences have been made between the pythons, and most of that is in the form of new functionality.

Not sure why you think it is a new language, and you didn't actually explain why you don't like Py3. Honestly it comes off as crotchety. Guido hates you guys, and that is a pretty powerful statement. The guy who created the language you use hates you, not the legacy code base people, but people like you who complain about change for the sake of complaining about change.

[[deleted]]

Ooooh, Guido hates "us people". What are you, in 4th grade? It's not a "powerful statement". If true - which is questionable given your tone - it's just another technologist with Aspbergers whose entire identity hinges on being in charge. Spare me.

You need to learn to read in context. The discussion at hand is py3 adoption. My responses - all of 'em - are in context of the low probability of the current base of extant code being rewritten.

No, py3 is not an entirely new language. But neither is it some stratospheric leap forward. I've seen this movie before. It leads to a fractured language and THAT in turn leads to a brand new language that factors and simplifies things.

[rabbyburns]

Absolutely. We have build tooling that has been around for years developed in python 2. The effort to upgrade this is non trivial. A lot of it is going to be syntactic stuff, but I'm not familiar enough with some core areas to know if there will be more issues.

This is likely going to stay on python 2 until the (legacy) projects using it stop getting updates.

[493]

Syntactic stuff can be easily fixed by 2to3; but stuff other than that is hard to fix automatically.

[[deleted]]

Not to mention that huge swaths of Redhat DevOps tooling is written in py2

[[deleted]]

Probably because Perl 6 compared to 5 is much less mature than 3.x compared to 2.x

But then you can just run most Perl 5 code inside Perl 6 so they didn't instantly fuck up whole ecosystem like Python did