Python 3 is out - now what? [LWN.net]

Python 3 is out - now what?

Posted Dec 11, 2008 9:33 UTC (Thu) by DeletedUser32991 ((unknown), #32991)
Parent article: Python 3 is out - now what?

At least Python 3 is overtly incompatible. When Debian switched to Python 2.5 (from 2.4) as default, lots of breakage (~50 third-party libraries) was still left despite python 2.5 being included for quite a while, some less subtle (like the the memory allocation funny stuff), some more subtle and varied (e.g. SOAPpy error handling breaking because the some objects became new-style classes for inheriting Exception).

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Incompatibility within Python 2.x

Posted Dec 11, 2008 17:45 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I decided to stay away from
Python. It seemed like every minor release had major backward
compatibility problems. When I noticed this I was mostly programming in
Perl, which has done a good job of maintaining backward compatibility in
5.x.

Of course, these days I prefer Ruby, though it has had some compatibility
problems between 1.8.x releases. :-/ (But similar to Python, it has a
new 1.9.x release that's explicitly incompatible.)

Incompatibility within Python 2.x

Posted Dec 18, 2008 13:28 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I decided to stay away from Python. It seemed like every minor release had major backward compatibility problems.

More familiarity may have demonstrated to you that major problems have actually been quite rare. I'm fairly unimpressed with Python 3, and I'm disappointed that changing the language was done in preference to a lot of other things which seem more important (at least to me), but until now Python has had a relatively good compatibility record.