Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future [LWN.net]

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 1, 2016 1:58 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946)
In reply to: It will never happen by b7j0c
Parent article: Cannon: Where are we in the Python 3 transition?

Where is there a Python 2.x “community”? All I see is a bunch of passive users wringing their hands over their piles of mouldering legacy code. A “community” is an active grouping of people contributing to ongoing development—people who give, not just receive.

In this sense, the Python “community” has clearly moved to Python 3.x.

to post comments

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 1, 2016 3:18 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (13 responses)

Where is there a Python 2.x “community”?

It seems to me that the underlying problem is that there are really two relevant Python communities: the language designers who write Python and the programmers who program in Python. There apparently isn't enough overlap between the two groups, so that the developers are ignoring the desires of the programmers, and the programmers appear not to have the capability of taking over maintaining Python 2.x so they can keep their backward compatibility. Dismissing the programmers as a bunch of passive users isn't helpful; a language needs both groups to be really successful.

Re: dismissing ... a bunch of passive users isn't helpful

Posted Jan 1, 2016 4:31 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (12 responses)

I don’t know what else you are supposed to do with them. There is a saying in the open-source community: “the one who writes the code makes the rules”. The ones who contribute (code, documentation, support, whatever) are the ones who have a say in the direction of the project; the ones who don’t, don’t.

Re: dismissing ... a bunch of passive users isn't helpful

Posted Jan 1, 2016 5:19 UTC (Fri) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (6 responses)

What those users would contribute, if they were listened to, is a requirement for stability or at least backwards compatibility. That is a contribution of policy or design (or management insight or vision) rather than one of code but it would nevertheless be a real contribution. In practice they can't make that contribution, because the group of people futzing around with the language itself isn't interested in receiving it.

Sure - “the one who writes the code makes the rules” - but if those rules make life hard for downstream users don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere. I say this as someone responsible for managing a couple of medium sized projects that have been burned by Python's instability. The lesson I learned was to veto choosing Python for new projects, and to the extent we have resources for porting old code I recommend migrating away from Python altogether rather than moving to Python 3.

Re: don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere

Posted Jan 1, 2016 6:38 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (5 responses)

I’ve got news for you: they never came here in the first place.

Who is going to bother to work, for free, supporting old legacy code for users who are too cheap to upgrade? Nobody.

Re: don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere

Posted Jan 1, 2016 12:05 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

Who is going to bother to work, for free, supporting old legacy code for users who are too cheap to upgrade? Nobody.

Well, nobody except for developers of C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Perl5, PHP, and many-many other languages. Note that two last languages were burned by an attempts to introduce incompatible change and did the right thing. As for Python? The only thing you need to know about it: don't. Don't use it if possible and especially don't use Python3 for anything ever. You'll be happier that way.

I still don't understand why this lesson is so hard to understand for developers of Python. Perl5 developers realized what happens first: Perl5 was developed in parallel to Perl6 and they only needed to decide that it'll continue to be the case in the future - indefinitely. PHP6 was never all that important for the PHP developers and users never actually felt the need to switch, thus it's abandonment was an easy decision. Python… python is in bad shape there: it's developers are still pretending that they could change the fate and shove the unwanted and pointless changes into the language. Their only hope (and I mean only) is that people will adopt it like scientific truth is adopted: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. I guess eventually, after maybe two or three decades, Python3 will became “a standard version of Python”, but it'll happen not because people will switch to it, but because new people will come and for them Python3 will be the only version they knew for a long time (in schools, universities, etc). The extemely naive hope that people will start adopting Python3 because Python2 support time will end is just stupid: it's not that hard to support a package (especially since for real users “support” here does not mean “we'll need to decide what changes to adopt and what to drop” but rather “we'll change the code when and if it'll be needed to make sure old version is still buildable on new systems”), it could be done for decades for sure.

Only time will tell what happens to python in the next 20-30 years when people will finally switch to Python3. My guess would that it'll become just another “legacy” platform because of that transition and join cool ranks of Cobol and Perl anyway… but who knows, it's looong time.

Re: don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere

Posted Jan 1, 2016 14:41 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Where computer languages are concerned, "too cheap to upgrade" to an incompatible version is tantamount to "too cheap to rewrite everything". Who is "too cheap" to do that? Everybody.

Re: don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere

Posted Jan 1, 2016 16:04 UTC (Fri) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link]

Heh. Aren't you the one who usually sees nothing wrong with the constant API and ABI breaks in Gtk+?

Re: Don't use [Python] if possible and especially don't use Python3 for anything ever

Posted Jan 1, 2016 20:38 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

You are too late. I learned Python back around 2.4 or so (after a few years with Perl and a brief dalliance with Tcl), and gradually moved to the 3 series by around 3.3. It is my language of first preference for new projects. I saw the 2→3 transition as a good thing, and a necessary thing. if you hate it, don’t use it, by all means. But don’t waste your time trying to claim it is going to be a bad experience for me, because it wasn’t.

Re: don't be surprised if they gradually go elsewhere

Posted Jan 6, 2016 20:39 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> “we'll change the code when and if it'll be needed to make sure old version is still buildable on new systems”

Just as a note, Python 2 only (officially) supports Visual Studio 2008 as its newest compiler on Windows[1]. Luckily, it is C, so you can compile-and-forget-it and just ship those binaries when the rest of your code grows up, but it is still a significant burden since finding the Express edition is non-trivial (nevermind a 64-bit toolchain if you need it). Importing the project into 2013 was a colossal failure (whether the fault of Visual Studio or something wrong in the project files is up for debate). Even bumping it to 2010 would be a great life saver for many people.

[1]https://docs.python.org/2/using/windows.html#compiling-py...

Re: dismissing ... a bunch of passive users isn't helpful

Posted Jan 1, 2016 17:31 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

A big thing that ordinary programmers contribute are the universe of libraries that extend from its core features into the realms of problems that programmers need to solve. Without those libraries, a language is mostly a toy. The big risk of breaking compatibility is that it also breaks compatibility for those libraries, which leaves you with a language that doesn't fulfill it's basic purpose of letting people get their work done.

Re: ordinary programmers contribute ... the universe of libraries

Posted Jan 1, 2016 20:41 UTC (Fri) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (3 responses)

I’m not aware of any important ones that are not already available for Python 3. The core libraries are all there. I use Blender a lot, and that has required Python 3 for a long while now (and just recently moved to 3.5). Database stuff, web stuff, graphics stuff ... all there.

Re: ordinary programmers contribute ... the universe of libraries

Posted Jan 1, 2016 23:17 UTC (Fri) by barryascott (subscriber, #80640) [Link] (2 responses)

Sadly wxPython is still not available with a stable py3 release. This was blocking my convertion to py3.

But I solved that problem another way. I ported my code from py2+wxPython to py3+PyQt5, and it was
a straight forward refactor. Indeed the Qt code is far cleaner then the wxPython version.
And moving from py2 to py3 is not hard in my experience and I have cleaner code as a result.

Re: ordinary programmers contribute ... the universe of libraries

Posted Jan 3, 2016 17:52 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

That's not very surprising. wxwindows has always been a warty beast, and it's sort of unavoidable because of the problems it inherits from its fundamental goal of sitting astride different widget libraries.

I suppose the value of wxwindows has faded as Qt has become increasingly good at abstracting the native platform issues and foibles. May the Qt project live long and healthily!

Re: ordinary programmers contribute ... the universe of libraries

Posted Jan 4, 2016 12:22 UTC (Mon) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

> I suppose the value of wxwindows has faded as Qt has become increasingly good at abstracting the native platform issues and foibles.

Only if the language which you use has good binding for Qt!
AFAIK only Python and (obviously) C++ have good binding for Qt whereas wxwindows can be used from many more languages..

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 1, 2016 8:16 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Python 2 is OK as-is. It's been debugged by hard production use throughout the last 7 years or so and is pretty much maintenance-free.

Most of the actual interesting development is concentrated in library code, and Py2 is very much alive and kicking there.

Oh, and don't forget that the second major Python implementation (PyPy) still barely supports Py3.

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 1, 2016 22:47 UTC (Fri) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link]

> In this sense, the Python “community” has clearly moved to Python 3.x.

Except for the ones who have moved on to Go, Swift and even Java so they can be part of the modern era

Python3 is worthless in the modern era for anything but the most trivial scripting tasks. It brings nothing to the table and is hopelessly lagging, by decades, the capabilities of its peers

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 2, 2016 1:20 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

> In this sense, the Python “community” has clearly moved to Python 3.x.

What's left of it, if you're representative of how it treats its own. I thought pythons weren't venomous snakes.

Re: if you're representative of how it treats its own

Posted Jan 2, 2016 1:51 UTC (Sat) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh dear. I did hope we could keep the ad-hominem bullshit out of this discussion...

Your attempt to make things personal is an admission that you have run out of rational things to say.

Re: if you're representative of how it treats its own

Posted Jan 2, 2016 2:48 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

> Your attempt to make things personal is an admission that you have run out of rational things to say.

And repeatedly trying to bash Python 2 users over the head with the idea that they're so insignificant they might as well not exist isn't?

The only thing I admit is that rationalizing in the face of such sheer arrogance is a waste of *anyone's* time.

Re: if you're representative of how it treats its own

Posted Jan 2, 2016 5:48 UTC (Sat) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

For fsck sake, would you quit morphing the subject line already?

*plonk*

Re: f you want [the] community to follow you to the future

Posted Jan 11, 2016 16:01 UTC (Mon) by rpcope1 (guest, #100731) [Link]

> Where is there a Python 2.x “community”? All I see is a bunch of passive users wringing their hands over their piles of
> mouldering legacy code. A “community” is an active grouping of people contributing to ongoing development—people who give, not just receive.

> In this sense, the Python “community” has clearly moved to Python 3.x.

You know, I'm simply one data point, but my employer maintains a rather sizable codebase (many hundreds of thousands of lines of Python 2.x) with lots of new code being produced and no clear path to migrating to Python 3.x in the near future; we are also a "tech" company, so this probably means we ahead of a lot of other users of Python. Even a lot of the high performance greenfield work I have been doing is yet again limited to 2.x because PyPy's support for 3.x is limited at best. I can't speak for the community at large, but to say that no "significant community" is interested in 2.x at the current time, is perhaps an overstatement.