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Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

The article shows an excellent example of 'moving fast and breaking things':

  < In comparison, Python started on CVS, moved to Subversion
  < in 2004, then to Mercurial in 2009, and is now moving
  < over to GitHub.

I used Python around 2004 and 2005, and never went back to it for my personal projects.

I would rather prefer 'moving slow and preserving things'. Any body here remembered how things went when Linux moved from OSS to ALSA? And now there's this systemd.

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You stopped using python because they changed the VCS they used for the language? If you're not working on python itself, the language, why does the VCS they use matter to you?

Python is usually considered the one language that moves slowly, exactly to preserve compatibility. Can you explain why you "never went back to it"?

You must be new to Linux. You see, the poster needed a random excuse to inject systemd flamebait, so they grasped at the closest straw they could find, whether or not it was even remotely relevant.

If they achieved a gain on their team by migrating to SVN, why shouldn't they have ?

If they achieved another gain by migrating to HG, why shouldn't they have ?

If they achieved further gains by migrating to git, why shouldn't they have ?

> I used Python around 2004 and 2005, and never went back to it for my personal projects.

How does the choice of VCS make a difference for your personal projects using Python?

It's going to be really funny when you discover PulseAudio, ha, ha...ha...

you just made my blood pressure go up a few points. The "killer feature" in PA is it's "uninstall" button. I've literally had my sound not work after an ubuntu installation, uninstalled PA, and it immediately worked fine.

I've had audio problems with OSS and ALSA too, in the past. Mostly with ALSA. Overall, PA is an improvement over those, but of course every change can bring new breakage, which was the original point.

I would not count your example as one of moving fast and breaking things. What was really broken by changing the VCS? If you still prefer CVS over git for lame super-conservative reasons that's your choice.

Speaking as a python user, I guess your way of development is then to still code everything in C and sh? No thanks. I'm willing to update my code to newer, less insane, versions of a language - if the benefits outweigh the pain of course.

I've been using Python since version 1.4 or 1.5. Since that time, they've made many changes, but Python has continued to be a great language. Of note, during the 2004 to 2005 timeframe, they released Python 2.4, which brought a number of speed improvements, multi-line imports, function/method decorators, the ability to invoke modules from the command line, built-in sets, generator expressions, new sort utilities, new string methods, etc.

In the face of all the great things happening in Python during 2004 and 2005, why would you abandon it due to a change in their VCS, especially when SVN is so similar to CVS?

What of the things you are doing did they break by "moving fast"? I learned Python around the same time frame, and while Python has had its pain points since then (packaging, I can see why Python3 is painful for some), "moving fast and breaking things" really doesn't fit my experience.

For people who love python here, do you use python 2 or python 3? 2.7? 2.8? 3.5?

I write new stuff in Python3, and what I do easily works on any Python3.

I don't have Python2 code to maintain, but if I had I would seriously consider updating it. Because I think the changes are reasonable for the most part.

Dou you write your C code in GCC C? Intel C? Microsoft C? C89? C99? C11? What libraries and what versions do you use?

I use both, but I like the changes in Python 3 more. I also like the way Python introduced version 3, by back porting features into the 2.x branch, thus easing the transition to some degree.

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