It also isn't true. It's an extraordinary claim that this random person on the Internet has better insight into the proper evolution of Python than its own creator. Of course, they offer no evidence to back up this assertion.
All this is is people who are simply resistant to change. In the Delphi world its corporate maintainer wants to introduce memory management, zero-based immutable strings and other modern developments to both attract new users and make developing for mobile devices easier. People began complaining, and over and over again they claimed that this was going to be done "for no reason at all". This was in spite of a massive white paper being produced that explained why they wanted to make the changes. These same people claimed that Java had these features "for no reason" and it took all of 10 seconds to find a Java white paper also explaining all the reasons these features exist in the language.
It's the same thing with the Python holdouts. "They broke everyone's code - and for bad [unspecified] reasons" is patently untrue. Guido and others painstakingly explained those reasons and the claimant isn't offering any rebuttal.
so I wasn't clear on the reasons why Python 3 is generally looked down upon.
Inertia. People just don't want to have to do anything to port code. No language has ever been as accomodating as Guido has been and they still want Python 2.8, 2.9, 2.999995, etc.
In that case, it's both disappointing and a bit depressing that there's so much strife in the community and FUD being spread about upgrading to 3.*. The responses to my first reply in this context have been evidence enough of that...
Python is a decent enough language. I really wish the community and lead devs would unify behind something, though, whatever it happens to be. The divergence is just more overhead to have to understand before spinning up this new project that I'm sure I'm going to inherit somehow.
Thanks for the longer response. Any chance you have those white papers bookmarked?
That is why I always ask for cited sources. It's hard to evaluate all of the data when I don't write much Python myself yet, but it seems that the community dislikes 3.* and the language devs work predominantly on 3.*. I suppose part of the reason I was initially opposed to my coworker's logic is his adamance when the only supporting claims he could make were "some big library authors don't like it", which isn't exactly a great argument and certainly not enough to warrant the level of confidence he was showing. His phrasing and argument were weak enough to make me question the underlying logic, which spawned this whole discussion. It seems that, in the end, he was right, but at least now I can support that argument with more data than he did.
It seems the path of least resistance for us here is 2.7 anyway so it looks like that's the path we'll be taking.
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u/alcalde May 26 '14
It also isn't true. It's an extraordinary claim that this random person on the Internet has better insight into the proper evolution of Python than its own creator. Of course, they offer no evidence to back up this assertion.
All this is is people who are simply resistant to change. In the Delphi world its corporate maintainer wants to introduce memory management, zero-based immutable strings and other modern developments to both attract new users and make developing for mobile devices easier. People began complaining, and over and over again they claimed that this was going to be done "for no reason at all". This was in spite of a massive white paper being produced that explained why they wanted to make the changes. These same people claimed that Java had these features "for no reason" and it took all of 10 seconds to find a Java white paper also explaining all the reasons these features exist in the language.
It's the same thing with the Python holdouts. "They broke everyone's code - and for bad [unspecified] reasons" is patently untrue. Guido and others painstakingly explained those reasons and the claimant isn't offering any rebuttal.
Inertia. People just don't want to have to do anything to port code. No language has ever been as accomodating as Guido has been and they still want Python 2.8, 2.9, 2.999995, etc.