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Comment by vegabook | Hacker News Reader

That is exactly what I am suggesting. There is no urgent necessity to add any new core language features to 2.7. That's what you 3 guys just don't get. I certainly don't need asyncio as much as I need vectorised numerics, and if I needed asyncio, I had at least 5 libraries already. I most definitely will never be type annotating Python. Cloud cuckoo land.

Let me warn you. If you persist with your propaganda on Python3, then GOLANG will be the future of Python. Does that register with you guys?

Nobody who uses Python 2.7 all day every day thinks it has any of these imaginary "worts" you 3.x guys like to pitch incessantly.

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> you 3 guys ... Cloud cuckoo land ... your propaganda ... Does that register with you guys?

Your comments have been crossing into incivility. Please don't do that; it breaks the site rules and leads to tedious flamewars. I'm sure you can make your argument civilly and substantively if you try.

I was overly aggressive. It's regrettable. But every point I made has been seriously contemplated, and is in my opinion worthy of consideration. The extent to which the 2.7 community and its arguments, are treated with derision by the 3.x people, makes some form of vigorous defence sometimes necessary. I'll add that unlike a large silent group of Python people who basically agree with me, I am not afraid to spend karma points speaking up against the received wisdom unambiguously and forcefully.

Now that I have made all my points, it's bye-bye.py. I won't comment on Python again.

> It's regrettable.

That makes it sound like you had no control.

Being rude is not "speaking up against the received wisdom", it's just being rude, and it's against the rules here. In the future, please post civilly and substantively or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

> Let me warn you. If you persist with your propaganda on Python3, then GOLANG will be the future of Python. Does that register with you guys?

This abstract future of Python has already been ceded to something that is not Python, just as once the abstract future of Perl was Python. Ruby once tried to take the mantle but failed. Go is now taking a lot of mindshare (from 2 or 3 more I wonder?) and I agree the Python 3 crowd just makes Go more likely to succeed, which is terrifying since it's probably the worst possible choice. My message is simply despair and accept the inevitable: Python will fade -- by all means keep using it, people still use Perl, scientist will be using it for a long time -- but the rest of the software world will pass you by. If you care about what the rest of the world is doing at all, you can help make sure the future passes to better general purpose high level languages like Nim or Clojure or OCaml, and for specific niches like scientific computing goes to the likes of Julia eventually. Anything but Go.

I'm currently registered on the Ocaml mooc ;-) Very intrigued by Nim too.

Yes I find Golang to be dry and uninspiring, but as per one of my other comments, I get 20x the performance, and the concurrency model beats Asyncio hands down. Honestly I needed to get 360 gigabytes of JSON into Cassandra and Python was going to take 6 days (there is some light conditionality on each datapoint preventing a raw dump). I took 1.5 of those days to learn how to do it in Golang, started it at midday today, and estimate it'll be done when I get into work tomorrow morning. Sometimes I just need to get stuff done.

EDIT: Just re-read your post and cannot help but agree that Python's demise is already telegraphed. History. Perl->Python->(?) is a nice analogy. Python won't die for sure, but it will not flourish like it did in the past decade. And yes I think it's good advice to look to more ambitious languages than Go, even if Go solves many "today" problems quite well. Personally wish Clojure would come off the JVM but am looking into Ocaml, Elixir, and when I need imperative, good ol' C wrapped up in Nim. All good candidates, though I really wish something would come up and go "fully vectorized" for the brave new world of GPUs. Personally need a REPL which is why Ocaml wins for now though Spark looks to me to be the "new R" for data science so I shouldn't exclude Scala (JVM notwithstanding). Decisions decisions...

It will be interesting to see what the final winner of GPU programming looks like. There's also the possibility of FPGAs making their way into consumer hardware, and right now the pure-Python library MyHDL is a great choice for those. There are a few attempts at abstracting over OpenCL like https://github.com/eholk/harlan, and some intriguing domain specific attempts like http://halide-lang.org/ but I think it will be a while yet before something takes over. I also don't think whatever it is can succeed without corporate backing.

Python Numba compiler (fast as julia) has a fair amount of Cuda and AMD HSA capability.

You're looking at this from the SV startup echo-chamber perspective.

People use Python because the language gets out of the way fairly quickly to let you get things done fairly quickly. Sure, it isn't a rigorous engineering language, but the ratio of small projects that just need something good enough and easy to work with to large/complex projects requiring careful engineering is staggeringly large. While Python is definitely cooling off; people have been working with it for long enough to want something better - unfortunately there just isn't anything on the radar that is significantly enough better to overcome Python's third party library momentum at the moment.

Believe me, I'd love a language with a really flexible/optional functional type system, better metaprogramming facilities, a better concurrency design, slightly more consistent syntax, etc - just as long as it is still easy to think in and convenient to use like Python.

> Believe me, I'd love a language with a really flexible/optional functional type system, better metaprogramming facilities, a better concurrency design, slightly more consistent syntax, etc - just as long as it is still easy to think in and convenient to use like Python.

As someone who, among dynamic languages, dismissed Perl quite a while back as not as useful as Python and Ruby, I'm starting to think Perl 6 may be the language that hits that spot.

No please! Julia Julia Julia fills all those, but with beatiful python like syntax, lisp like macros when you wnat them, go like channels, distributed capabilities and leading class numerical stuff. Also webserver with a front end that you can build with polymer in Pure Julia.

http://escher-jl.org/

Julia!!!!! The answer to all these problems, both for general and science programming.

I wonder how much faster pypy would be in parsing 360 GB of data.

I use Python 2.7 all day every day and I definitely still notice the warts and find them irritating. They are minor warts, and almost never affect my productivity, but they're definitely things that should have been, and are, fixed. super(what do I pass here again?), old vs. new style classes, integer division, input, print, exception bubbling/chaining, nonsense compares between different types, True/False/None as regular variables, no "nonlocal"... Then there are the features I can't use, like extended unpacking and merging, better yielding, function annotations, and lots of improvements to the standard library in terms of their API and functionality.

I'm not a fan of asyncio, but the other stuff is quite awesome. It's not compelling enough to port some of my older Python 2.7 projects, and isn't a revolution of the language or anything, but they're good improvements. And even if they weren't good improvements, Python 3 is the future, and Python 2.7 simply won't be a viable option for a lot longer.

I would suggest toning down the arrogance. Just because you don't personally need some features does not mean that people who want the language to progress and not stagnate are idiots.

That's rich when it is the 2.7 users like myself who are constantly bombarded with arrogance and condescension. Nobody wants Python to stagnate. The argument is which direction it should take.

You contribute the same borderline FUD in every thread that is related to Python. It's unfortunate that Python is not the language you want it to be, but consider just how dismissive you are of the needs of others - frankly, it comes across as arrogant.

FUD? I have >100k lines of highly sophisticated numerical analysis Numpy/Python code in fixed income which has cost literally millions of dollars. I'm not going to let that investment get toyed with by the webified 3.x crew without vigorously stating my point.

Could Python 3 host the features you want? If it did, would you consider migrating your code-base to it? I'm positive that if your ideas have merit and you share them on the python-ideas mailing list, you'll get a good discussion out of it at the very least.

> Nobody who uses Python 2.7 all day every day thinks it has any of these imaginary "worts" you 3.x guys like to pitch all day.

Maybe people who use 2.7 all day don't see the warts as much as someone who has been rid of them?

It took me a week struggling with Asyncio to wrap my mind around it. It took me 12 hours to do the same with Golang channels.

I got 20 000 inserts per second from a 360 gig JSON file into Cassandra using 30 goroutines. I was maxing out at 900 in Python 3. Golang was parsing the JSON at a frankly RIDICULOUS 2 million lines per second. Python 3 was around 50 thousand.

Python 3 is adding features that other languages do better. Python smashes other languages in numerics, and approachability. Nobody needs 3 for numerics, and 3 goes backwards in approachability. If you're using 3 for its back-end tools, you're using the wrong tool.

I would never move to golang for numerics because pandas/numpy/scipy/theano stomp all over it, but its only for numerics that I'll stay with Python. Everything else I'm moving away (mostly Golang, looking at Elixir) and talking to the numeric stack over zeroMQ/msgpack.

> 20 000 inserts per second from a 360 gig JSON file into Cassandra using 30 goroutines. I was maxing out at 900 in Python 3. Golang was parsing the JSON at a frankly RIDICULOUS 2 million lines per second. Python 3 was around 50 thousand.

Newsflash, Go is fast. I'm sure those numbers will be worse in Py2 than Py3 as well, but aside from that what's your point? Python is slow so... don't switch to Python 3?

> Python 3 is adding features that other languages do better. Python smashes other languages in numerics, and approachability. Nobody needs 3 for numerics, and 3 goes backwards in approachability. If you're using 3 for its back-end tools, you're using the wrong tool.

Sure, people using it for numerical stuff might like Py2, but is that the only use case of Python? Should I not switch because you do numerical stuff? Django is great for backend stuff, as is the whole ecosystem (twisted, flask, DRF, asyncio).

Python 3 is also far more approachable than Python 2. Try explaining to someone why their program exploded after typing an umlaut into it, the magical "from __future__ import division" incantation or even the silly super() syntax.

Newsflash. Python 3's main pragmatic selling points are Unicode and Async. Golang is Unicode by default, its concurrency model is much easier to reason about, and it's 20x faster. Why on earth would you use Python 3 (or 2) for your backend? You like buying 20 server boxes when 1 golang box will do? If you think Python will survive as a production language on servers, you're dreaming. It's done, defeated, history on the server outside of legacy code. Django? gimmeabreak.

So what's left that Python does better than any other language? Numerics. That's the only place where you still have a sticky user base that is not likely to dump Python. So don't be so quick do dismiss it. It's the only leg Python is left standing on that other languages cannot easily devour.

Approachability. Not much in it. For every 3/2 = 1 you cite I give you unintuitive lazy ranges, the complete idiocy that 01 != 1, and the unnecessary print functionization which removes one of Python's greatest first-line simplicity selling points. But I will give you that Python 3 remains approachable as a first language. However on that front, inroads every day from JS, where a new coder can get "wow" results in the browser much more quickly than the boring ol' VT100 terminal.

Julia has multithreading and channels. Better syntax than go, more like python. Better for numerics...why use anything else?

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