Hacker News Reader

Comment by fogleman | Hacker News Reader

I'll say it. Python 2: Stability. Python 3: Feature creep.

I've been doing a lot of Go lately and hugely appreciate the minimal syntax and orthogonal features. Seems like the opposite is happening not just in Python but many languages.

View on HN

Are you the same person who advocates switching to Go over Python 3 in every single Python thread? Not everyone prefers the minimal approach, particularly in a dynamic, higher level scripting language, where ease of use trumps other considerations.

Go and Python occupy different niches, for the most part. So the design considerations for Go are naturally different than those for Python.

Nah that ain't me. I rarely comment on such matters actually. Like you said Go and Python serve quite different purposes and each do their jobs well. I use both on a regular basis and I've been using Python for over a decade. But I still think there's something to be said for simplicity in any language.

The vintage Scheme vs Common Lisp argument.

I'll say it too.

Python 2: Stability

Python 3: Features -- Unicode, yield from, better HTTP, asyncio, more flexible destructuring, better concurrency libs, better SSL/TLS

Python 2 is still a good language because they backported a lot of the improvements that landed in Python 3. It's headed in a good direction.

For me, it's Python 2: weird quirks (unicode support sucks, I have to do from future import for a lot of things, etc.). On the other hand, Python 3 fixes many of these things, and even others that I didn't realize could be better thought out (such as names of some stdlib functions, etc.)

I used to feel that way,but all my day jobs are python 2. They never to seem to want to budget in time to do an upgrade to python 3. It's been frustrating.

Lately I've been so frustrated I've actually been researching new languages with better performance, because that's a MUCH easy sales pitch to the business managers.

Julia :-)

PyPy3?

The time it would take to port code from 2 to 3 would likely be less than the time it would take to port to another language. And using the scipy stack makes numerical computing incredibly fast (fast enough for me considering it takes me longer to figure out how to analyze the results), though your use case may differ.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com