Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

No, he means language level progressive deprecation and evolution, as opposed to an abrupt jump to a changed 3 from 2.

The Django project has added Python 3 compatibility in Django 1.5 as experimental. It remained experimental in 1.6. It became supported in 1.7. They announced around that time that Django 2.0 would only support Python 3.

Then, they released a first 3.x compatible LTS with Django 1.8. Then they released 1.9, compatible with 3.4 and 3.5.

They then release 1.10. And they are releasing 1.11 soon as an LTS, which they previously announced would be the last in the 1.x branch and the last to support Python 2. It will be supported for AT LEAST THREE YEARS after its released.

Good lord. If the deprecation and evolution gets any more progressive, it'll compete with darwinism. And yet, alanfranzoni complains about it. And YOU COMPLAIN ABOUT IT elsewhere in the thread, saying they're "screwing their userbase" and "leaving their users in the dust".

Don't you think you're being a little fricking entitled? This is an open source project and they're doing quite literally everything right.

I couldn't agree more. This transition and their release management in general has been handled excellently for years. Anyone complaining here is quite literally whining.

You talk as if Python 3 were a dialect of Lisp. It's still Python, looks like Python and feels like Python. In fact, I think most of my Python 3 code runs on Python 2.

You talk as if the switch doesn't look like a bunch of arbitrary decisions made on the appearance of purity. If more of an attempt had been made a maintaining compatibility, there wouldn't be nearly as much fight. Python 3 becomes a bit uncanny valley for me when I try to code in it and I tend to use a different language as there less of an internal code switch, especially as I still have to maintain large numbers of python2 code.

They got rid of a lot of cruft that's with us since 1.5.x. Python 3 is a great language, much better than Python 2 when you explore the differences.

The truth is, it's Python. I'm not looking for a great language, I'm looking for language that'll help me get work done... quickly and not give me a migraine if I have to come back to it (Perl). The 3 changes are just big enough to catch me (and every other Python programmer I've worked with) so that I can't just program, which tends to push me towards keeping it in 2.7 or switching to another language, where the similarities don't exist to pull me into bad habits. The whole mess really sours me on the language that made me love programming again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com