Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 6, 2019 10:40 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Revisiting PEP 394 by anselm
Parent article: Revisiting PEP 394

> It is an advantage in the real world (as opposed to the fantasy world where Python 3 didn't happen), because Python 3 isn't going away – Python 2 is. Bitching and moaning won't change that.
I've started a couple of 100k line projects in Py2 during the last 3 years. Mwaahahaha! I hope to do more of that, Py2 must live forever!

> And guess what: PHP is still a terrible language :^)
Yes it is. Not that Python is much better now.

Perl developers also did all the right things:

1) They hard-forked the language. But Perl5 is supported and is being improved all the time. The current Perl5 interpreter is much faster than 10 years ago, for example. In contrast, Python developers abandoned the Py2 code base (only occasionally shitting on it to break existing software).

2) They used a language fork as an excuse to drastically improve the language: Perl6 has no GIL, it has truly well thought out Unicode support and the language itself has been regularized. Initial 4 versions of Python 3 had no real improvements whatsoever compared to Py2.

3) There's no drive to force everyone to forget Perl 5. No self-celebratory sites "Perl5 days to death" or any other such nonsense.

Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 6, 2019 11:55 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (3 responses)

That might also be a consequence of Perl 6 being, in practical terms, a total failure for at least a decade.

If I remember correctly, for years it existed only as documentation. Then there was the Parrot VM (which was meant to be generic enough to run any dynamic language including Perl 6, which in practice meant the VM developers just wrote a garbage-collected continuation-passing-style assembly language and didn't really care about any high-level language at all; and most of the work was done by two people, but they fell out and one quit). Then someone got fed up with the slow progress of Parrot and wrote Pugs (but that was more of a prototyping tool than a production-quality implementation, and it was written in Haskell so even fewer people would be able to contribute to it).

I stopped paying attention before Rakudo, which appears to be somewhat usable now (though with poor performance)? And apparently the Perl 6 language was declared stable in 2015, twelve years after the first Perl 6 book was published. But it's hard to lose such a long-standing well-deserved reputation as a joke and as a community that doesn't get things done.

In contrast, Python 3 had the misfortune of being successful. By the time people realised it was a terrible idea to break compatibility so heavily for such minor gains, it was too late to stop.

Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 6, 2019 18:45 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> That might also be a consequence of Perl 6 being, in practical terms, a total failure for at least a decade.
Had Py2 been supported then Py3 would have been a similar "failure".

It also took almost 10 years for Py3 to gain serious traction.

Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 24, 2019 15:09 UTC (Sun) by naptastic (guest, #60139) [Link] (1 responses)

s/total failure/research language/;

It's only a failure if you don't learn from it.

Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 25, 2019 14:53 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

“If you can't be a great success then at least try to be a horrible warning.”

Revisiting PEP 394

Posted Mar 8, 2019 12:51 UTC (Fri) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]

> I've started a couple of 100k line projects in Py2 during the last 3 years. Mwaahahaha! I hope to do more of that, Py2 must live forever!

Cobol is alive too, so python2 should be safe. I guess now's as good a time as any to set up your job security :p