Hacker News Reader

We ported a major production site from python 2 to 3 a year ago. Exactly one bug has come up - something to do with unicode encoding on a relatively minor part of the site. Thanks to 2to3, the concerns for bugs coming up in porting are way overblown.

View on HN

The only insidious issues I've encountered with porting apps have been related to Unicode as well. A lot of old Python 2 code is (what appears to me) very hackish compared to the elegance that is Python 3.

I've seen quite a bit when porting a statistical library that used Python 2's default floor/int division behavior for quite a few operations.

Sometimes, though, the 2 version had bugs because of this behavior. So, the bugs were both subtle and bi-directional. I definitely fault Python 2 for allowing that practice, and am glad we're now using Python 3.

I think it has more to do with that people using Python3 want to write good looking code, and the people still using Python2 are more interested in getting something running quickly and therefore tend to produce hackish code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com