Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 13, 2021 16:42 UTC (Mon) by pebolle (guest, #35204)
In reply to: Python discusses deprecations by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Python discusses deprecations

> Perl 7

Has that ever materialized?

> IMO, the story with Python was worse as a result.

Of course this is a subject one can debate forever (especially on the web). But I'd say Perl 6 promised more, took forever, split the developer community, and delivered a "sister" language (and a compiler and a VM that are only used for Perl 6). They even had to rename it to Raku because having Perl 5 en 6 simultaneously hurt both languages. So I'd say Perl took a pretty bad hit.

Anyhow, both Perl 5 and 6 and Python 2 and 3 ended up incompatible. It never ceases to amaze me!

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 13, 2021 16:45 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

> Has that ever materialized?

Most recent status update I am aware of is https://gist.github.com/Grinnz/be5db6b1d54b22d8e21c975d68...

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 13, 2021 16:52 UTC (Mon) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

> Most recent status update I am aware of is https://gist.github.com/Grinnz/be5db6b1d54b22d8e21c975d68...

Thanks.

I stumbled on that too when looking into this this (Northern Hemisphere) summer. My impression was and is that Perl 7 petered out. We'll see.

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 14, 2021 0:35 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

> It never ceases to amaze me!

It's because for language developer backward compatibility is a pain, often an embarrassment, but for language users it's a boon… but language is developed by language developers, not by users.

Still… python popularity never ceases to amaze me: so many were burned by it — yet people still continue to use it… why? What does it have that other, more stable languages, doesn't have?

I guess that would remain mystery for the foreseeable future.

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 14, 2021 9:26 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> Still… python popularity never ceases to amaze me: so many were burned by it — yet people still continue to use it… why? What does it have that other, more stable languages, doesn't have?
> I guess that would remain mystery for the foreseeable future.

Languages don't thrive in a vacuum. There is a whole host of libraries that work very well and lots of components that you might want to work with provide language bindings and Python is among those that tend to come with good support (docs etc). The incompatibility was a hassle and I do strongly feel that it could have been handled better even if it the outcome after the changes were better code but the popularity itself isn't a mystery at all.

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 15, 2021 19:17 UTC (Wed) by xyz (subscriber, #504) [Link] (1 responses)

>Still… python popularity never ceases to amaze me: so many were burned by it — yet people still continue to use it… why?

Do you know any other language that has not burnt users one way or another?

> What does it have that other, more stable languages, doesn't have?

Very good modules/packages that you can use without reinventing the wheel.
It is a very nice language and it has a huge ecosystem.

Python discusses deprecations

Posted Dec 24, 2021 11:01 UTC (Fri) by bartoc (guest, #124262) [Link]

It also works very well on windows. Much better than perl5 or ruby (did you know mesonbuild has special checks because perl5 and ruby add broken toolchains to PATH on windows?). Python basically "just works", the binary distribution is "official" and almost every package also works, including ones that have C extensions. For people embedding it it's pretty easy to build on windows as well, and with msvc to boot (which historically has been important because mingw links against a C runtime that hasn't been updated since _1998_, recently mingw has grown support for linking against the ucrt, which is the "current" windows C runtime). It also has very good tooling support with the whole type annotations thing.

I'm sure the windows story for ruby and perl5 (and even bash, although that's harder as windows can't do fork() _or_ exec()) could be improved with some dedication and just ... clearing out the cobwebs, but there are a lot of cobwebs.

Despite the general shortcomings of windows as a platform a good percentage of developers need their software to run there