I have zero interest in investing more time into Python 3. I do not believe Python 3 is something that can be repaired in a way to surpass Python 2 in enjoyability for me.
I'm surprised you bother with Python 3 at all. It's basically dead at the moment and so many other important contributors have simply moved on to other languages.
How did you reach for that conclusion? A stable language is extremely refreshing to me. This also had the side effect of letting PyPy catch up. You wouldn't say that C or Common Lisp are dead, would you?
As I've been porting my own libraries, I've stumbled across things that were unintuitive or that could have been done better. For the most part I can see why things were done that way in Python 3, and I'm willing to accept a few unexplained warts.
But I don't get, and don't support, the constant calls to essentially throw Python 3 out the window and return to the world of Python 2. And in fact I'm at the point of actively wanting to shame and shun people whose entire corpus of writing on Python now consists of attempts to do so.
It's not hard to understand why these things were done that way: idealism and lack of practical experience. I don't know if you ever looked at Python 3.0 but it was a ridiculously broken language and it took three more releases to get it to annacceptable level.
Python 3 is better now than it was before but i would still not trust it to run my stuff as well as 2.x did. Especially because pypy compatibility is more important for me than the nonlocal keyword.
I'm not saying killing 3.x is the only solution but i hope you agree that the roof is on fire. We're all spending lots of time and effort to keep our libraries compatible with python 3 but there are barely any users. What's worse is that Python 3 has lots of new Python users whereas lots of experienced are in the 2.x campt which causes friction.
What do you want me to do? Close my eyes and lie to myself that everything is going to be okay? Lots of people did that and that did not help.
If you believe that is going to help the adoption of Python 3 … I have my doubts. Sure, you can just categorically declare that my opinion is not worth anything if that makes you happier.
See my reply to Alex's comment. Even if I shared your opinion of Python 3, I would still think that the time to be constantly turning out hit pieces on it is long past.
IMO, "please be quiet" is not a productive response to criticisms coming from folks whom have actually already ported many lines of code and whom are now maintaining cross-compatible code bases.
I realize that's not what you mean to say, but I'm not sure there's any practical difference between that and saying that you are going to ignore structured technical criticism purely based on who it's coming from. The criticisms may sting, and they could probably be delivered with a bit more kindness and respect, but if they're accurate, they need to stand on their tech merit independent of the style of delivery, the natural feeling of "oh the ungrateful masses" that comes naturally after having spent a lot of time on something that gets panned, and the natural fear of negativity surrounding a community marketing effort.
I've been on both sides of this particular fence before, and it's not fun on either side. But from what I can tell of this particular issue, the Python core team has put themselves in a position where this is inevitable. They've done this by hard-line declaring "no 2.8, ever" and being maybe a bit overly conservative where it comes to making changes that make it easier to maintain cross-compatible Py2/Py3 codebases. One such change would be to make __getitem__ of bytes objects return a bytes object instead of an integer, and there are probably a hundred other little ones like that plus a bunch of structural changes like making the choice to use bytes objects at IO boundaries so as not to flout reality so grossly.
the community is divided on this matter and I challenge you to get more support with this arrogance.
most people that support Py3 do it because they were told that it was for the best by the people who are supposed to know best, so far it's been a great disappointment.
maybe it's time the community routes around you instead, like the article suggests.
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u/mitsuhiko Flask Creator May 26 '14
I have zero interest in investing more time into Python 3. I do not believe Python 3 is something that can be repaired in a way to surpass Python 2 in enjoyability for me.