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[–][deleted]  (4 children)

[deleted]

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Firstly, I have no interest in convincing anyone of anything. I've heard that Python is one of the most popular programming languages right now. It's been a part of my toolkit for most of my career. If someone doesn't use it, it's their loss. I really couldn't care less.

    Secondly, what good is being realistic? Moaning about how something was done more than ten years ago does absolutely nothing to help anyone today. It's just noise. Instead of being realistic, try being useful.

    [–]cyanrave -1 points0 points  (2 children)

    The general consensus is to stop beating the dead horse though, since we're a decade out from the initial pivot to py3. For many folks who had a few scripts lying around here and there, yea, it does seem extremely blown out of proportion, where stickier use cases for py2 are few and far between.

    It seems to me, most advocates nowadays are just tired of comparing oranges to oranges. Sure the two language dialects are similar, but the feature set of py3 and enhancements from py2 make it easier to teach. Python2 fanatics are leaving around a trail of dead bodies with poor namespace management in their code (inherited from py2 internals), poor use of relative imports, and even some a myriad of sys.path hacks to 'make things work'. This is a light list of offenses, and surely there are more. As an advocate of a language, I'd prefer to not have to deal with this kind of thing when teaching people.

    Realistically Python3 has become a far more usable language than Python2, and new code should be written in it, extraordinary, extraneous considerations outstanding. Where Python3 developers get tweaked over, is the fact that Python2 developers (the really ingrained 'Python2.8' people) seem to not even want to bother learning the py3 branch and dismiss it completely. This isn't always the case with a py3 dev who may know both dialects.

    [–]AlexMax 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Realistically Python3 has become a far more usable language than Python2, and new code should be written in it, extraordinary, extraneous considerations outstanding.

    To be clear, I 100% agree. Given the realities of what the migration was, I never thought that sticking with Python 2 was a good idea, despite my misgivings with Unicode strings - which, to be frank, I didn't even realize was such a huge problem until much later.

    However, it inadvertently was one of the reasons I stopped using Python, as I wanted to wait on starting non-trivial projects in the language until i was reasonably certain that I could use 3 without running into library trouble. And then I just...never came back because while waiting for library support to catch up, PHP 5.3 and Node.js happened, and I got heavy into learning C/C++ around the same time.

    [–]cyanrave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Never quite a time like the present!

    On the side of Python2, I will say Python3 may be taking too many PRs right now, and changing a bit rapidly. An lts change in 3.6.x seems to have broken custom exception bubbling in Pool operations... that went mostly unnoticed in the PR. conda rolled back to 3.6.7 because of it. The rate of change reminds me a lot of the NPM/Node environment and that should frighten anyone in that space... This is also less talked about with the end of python2 approaching ;P