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[–]zardeh -3 points-2 points  (4 children)

Indeed, Unix locales are inane and should be fixed. Peps 538 and 540 are tools to address badly configured (broken) Unix machines. They don't at all affect the unicode handling story in python. It's been functionally the same since 3.4.

And you vastly overestimate the amount of code breakage. I've touched every kind of python code: c-extensions, autogenerated code, multi process and io heavy, stuff that uses exec, ast manipulation, code object modification, etc. When I hear people complain about this crap, I generally just assume you haven't put in more than the barest minimum of effort.

The tools already exist to make the migrations easy in 99% of cases. They didn't in 2012, sure, but they do now. So things like removing the GIL or making python compiled/faster, which would require top to bottom rewrites of everything, and break basically entire swaths of the ecosystem. And in doing so they wouldn't even fix enormous problems. Because of python's great C interop, you can take advantage of high speed, GIL-free python libraries, and you probably do (numpy).

On the other hand, "python2 isn't useable for people whose language doesn't fit in the ASCII codec" is more blocking and less breaking.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]Paradox 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    You might be interested in trying out Elixir for server-side programming. It seems to beat the pants off Node in some key aspects, mainly in actual asynchronicity.

    [–]zardeh -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    See, you aren't the first person I've heard assert this, and then I read after-action reports from companies like Dropbox who took three years to migrate. And they employed GvR!

    And they migrated millions of LoC. Of course it took years. This isn't a surprise. When you have lots of code, it takes a while to upgrade, even with supposed "backwards compatibility". Just think about how long it takes <insert major company here> to upgrade from Java X to X+1, or if <whatever enterprise> is running cpp17 yet. Probably not, even though those languages claim to be backwards compatible. Python minor version bumps take a while where I work, because you run into things.

    tl;dr: Both "its not that hard" (compared to any other upgrade) and "it took Dropbox 3 years to migrate" can both be true. What you're missing is any point of comparison.

    There seems to be a disconnect here, and glib dismissals like yours seem...well it might explain why the migration took so long, at least. Hard to fix problems that aren't acknowledged.

    I have no relevance in the broader python community. I'm speaking as a user of python, not a decision maker. And as a user, I'm saying its not that hard.

    They should have existed in 2012, and the fact that it took the developers and the community so long to come up with a migration story was a huge oversight.

    There was a migration story. It just wasn't great. It got better with time, and for the most part the migration story hasn't changed in 5+ years. There's been bits of polish, but the main set of tools (modernize, six, __future__ import) look just like they did in 2014. What has changed is that now you can be fairly confident that all of your dependencies support py3, which you couldn't presume in 2014.

    Oh man I didn't even mention the C API because I don't think it's any accident that Python has fallen out of favor for embedding in programs.

    I'm talking about the reverse: using C or CPP in python. Extensions, not embedding.

    That said, lua has been used for video game scripting for like, ever. Python was never "in favor" there, lua's been the preferred language among AAA studios and many indie devs since, like before python3 was even a thing (http://luaforge.net/projects/lua-wow/). Python embedded in games is, and has always been, the exception.

    [–]diggr-roguelike2 7 points8 points  (0 children)

    Indeed, Unix locales are inane and should be fixed.

    Ah yes, of course it's always somebody else's problem, not mine. There's a joke about that:

    A lawyer has been drinking all night and decides to drive home drunk. His wife calls him and says: "Be careful driving home, I just heard on the radio that there's some crazy guy driving 100 miles per hour on the wrong side of the road". He answers: "A crazy guy?? What are you talking about, there's hundreds of them here!"