In the time it took to write that article he could have ported a hundreds of lines of python 2 to python 3. If people spent as much time upgrading as they spent time complaining about having to upgrade we would have made a lot of progress. Is creating a third version of python that is worse than the current one but can use old libraries a good way or is working on moving forward and developing the newest versions of our language the best way.
If people spent as much time upgrading as they spent time complaining about having to upgrade we would have made a lot of progress.
That's a pretty pointless argument for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that there is no reason to upgrade because Python 3 does not have a business benefit for lots of people.
As a person maintaining open source code Python 3 for me doubles my work for zero benefit as I'm not using Python 3 myself.
As a person working in a company upgrading to Python 3 means that I lose compatibility to the ecosystem and PyPy. If I support both, then why not just continue using Python 2?
Aside of that, there is so much stuff in Python 3 that is barely reviewed because there are no users that it's really damn hard to argue that it's unconditionally a better language.
//EDIT: arguing with "if people" is not useful in general anyways because a system would obviously be most efficient if all actors in it, would share the same ideals. But that's not how the world works. You could use the same argument to ask for why we don't have world peace.
So write your code to be compatible with 2 and 3. In most cases, this is very easy, and the right way to go. Many open source projects do it that way (mine included).
Also, if maintaining a Py3 version doubles your work, you are doing it wrong. Running your tests in a different interpreter should in no way double your work.
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u/252003 May 26 '14
In the time it took to write that article he could have ported a hundreds of lines of python 2 to python 3. If people spent as much time upgrading as they spent time complaining about having to upgrade we would have made a lot of progress. Is creating a third version of python that is worse than the current one but can use old libraries a good way or is working on moving forward and developing the newest versions of our language the best way.