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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Python 2.7 is outdated by Python 3.5. The fact that there is a bugfix release doesn't change that.

That's just what the lead project team declared. Not what the user base asked for or wants.

>You can still program in C 89 or FORTRAN 77 or COBOL 74 (and no doubt there is somebody still supporting compilers and runtimes for those), but they are all obsolete standards.

That's because people stopped using them organically. That's not the case with Python 2 -- Python 3 was declared "the new hotness" with a decree from above.

It's like as if the W3C comes out with some incompatible HTML NG on their own and says that HMTL 5 is "end of line", giving billions of webpages the middle finger.

Even worse, it's also as if HTML NG only had some marginal improvements over HTML 5, and was otherwise the same.

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> That's just what the lead project team declared. Not what the user base asked for or wants.

You think they are doing it just for kicks? There are no issues with Python 2? They are also part of the user base, and they did it for a reason.

> That's because people stopped using them organically. That's not the case with Python 2 -- Python 3 was declared "the new hotness" with a decree from above.

Well, I for instance stopped using Python 2 when Python 3 came out, if it was possible for me to do so (I had all the libraries I needed). I understand that many people can't do it, but people are organically moving from Python 2 to Python 3, not the other way around.

Nobody is really forcing you to not use Python 2, just as nobody is forcing you not to use FORTRAN 77 or COBOL 74. It's just that the language will not evolve anymore, and as far as runtime goes, you will be on your own eventually.

> It's like as if the W3C comes out with some incompatible HTML NG on their own and says that HMTL 5 is "end of line", giving billions of webpages the middle finger.

I think I already addressed this in my other comments.

>You think they are doing it just for kicks?

Yes. From a false sense of "we know better than you what's good for you". And also from not being connected to actual business and end user needs.

>There are no issues with Python 2?

That's irrelevant. There are issues with Python 3. Besides, the issues that Python 3 fixed over 2 are marginal at best and most could be retroffited to 2.x (as this 2.8 release proves). Nothing earth shattering to make the transition worth it.

>Nobody is really forcing you to not use Python 2, just as nobody is forcing you not to use FORTRAN 77 or COBOL 74. It's just that the language will not evolve anymore, and as far as runtime goes, you will be on your own eventually.

It's more likely that Python will suffer from people moving to other languages (and already, first Rails and then JS have won the server side over Python big time, and JS looks poised to be more general use too), than that anything good will comes out of this "you're free to use 2.x, it just wont be updated anymore".

> And also from not being connected to actual business and end user needs.

I am not really personally bothered by Python 3 being incompatible (with that one Jython exception that I already mentioned). But I would like to point out the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13146127, I think you're the one who is wrong here.

> It's more likely that Python will suffer from people moving to other languages

Unlikely. Rails are probably going out of fashion. Javascript is a terrible language, which only saving grace is a decent support in browsers. I am not sure for what other reason, choosing a language today, I would choose Javascript over Python 3.

So people moving from Python 2 are most likely to end up with Python 3, I don't really see compelling alternative for them (unless they are going to something more functional like Clojure or Haskell or Scala, but that's entirely different discussion; for example I like Python a lot but I feel pure functional is where the future is, I find the imperative programming quite annoying these days, I would prefer Haskell, but frankly, I am not nearly as productive in it as I am in Python, because Python's focus on usability is very hard to match by any language).

On the other hand, I think Python 3 will actually gain in science and data analysis thanks to things like @ operator for matrix multiplication.

Go and Julia are already reaping the benefits.

I see no future for Python be that 2 or 3. It's not great at anything, but projects a veneer of friendliness (that one should quickly outgrow) on top of a pile of bad implementation decisions and terrible design.

Its popularity is based on superficial attributes rather than solid foundations. Eventually, the entire ecosystem will collapse and the masses will flood to the next attractor.

Julia can be a good competitor to Python, but far in the future. Now it's just not there yet.

Go is interesting, but really a different (and perhaps smaller) use case. What, for instance, I do in Python? That little one-off script that converts one thing to another or calculates something - I am not sure why I would even bother thinking about Go.

I have no doubt that at some point, Python will be replaced by something. But I don't think it will be any of the languages that are currently in widespread use. Heck, C is also not based on solid foundations (I mean like type theory or something), and it wasn't fully replaced yet.

>C is also not based on solid foundations

C is based on the solidest possible foundation: the actual hardware CPU.

The C abstract machine doesn't have that much in common with any actual hardware. I suppose it sort-of resembled the PDP-11 once.

C does not define an abstract machine. That's the runtime implementation's job.

What's wrong with Julia? 1.0 should be coming out in a bit less than a year.

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