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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Why hasn't the Python community moved on to Python 3 yet?

Who says it hasn't?

Just because there are stragglers doesn't mean the community, as a whole, hasn't moved (or isn't moving).

The fact that even nowadays people are still wondering about python 2 vs. 3 shows that the community hasn't move to python 3. Otherwise this wouldn't be even a question.

There are still people who haven't moved from VB6 to VB.NET. It's the nature of such major, breaking transitions.

(https://adtmag.com/articles/2016/05/24/microsoft-visual-basi...)

No, it shows that those people are on the fence. It says nothing of the community on the whole.

You're being disingenuous.

Uninformed people.

Most of it has, and it is good to document upgrade pathways for 2 to 3 migrations. Some of those migrations require 2 and 3 compatible code. I also highly recommend using the six library.

I'm using Django 1.8 first with Python 2.7 then migrated the code to 3.4 with no problems

You can migrate to Django 1.11, it's also LTS like 1.8.

Google has been a big holdout within the community, and by continually releasing Python-based machine learning software without Python 3 support, they've helped slow its adoption in that field. Otherwise, most of the community has moved to Python 3.

I'm curious, which libraries are you talking about specifically?

Because it is a serious regression.

That's an opinion, not a fact.

Performance can be measured.

The rest is indeed opinion. The opinion of the python community after almost 10 (!) years after after the first release is quiet obvious: 3.x sucks!

I just don't know from where all the 3.x apologist appear as soon as there is a discussion. There always appears to be an inherent need to somehow defend this complete failure.

Performance can be measured. And what better way than at scale. Facebook wrote an article a while back about how all new code is written in python3, and they are seeing huge performance wins because of it.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1040181199381023/python-in-p...

Most of the performance gains seem to come from the async/await stuff which is a rather late development which has actually nothing to do with any 3.x features. Could be done with 2.x as well.

Async/await is a 3.5+ language feature, and Python's core integration of async support, both at a language level and in the standard library, is all 3.x stuff.

Some of it you could do with 3rd party libraries and no syntactic support in 2.x, but it's absolutely false to say async has nothing to do with any 3.x features.

>Performance can be measured.

Performance isn't the only metric.

>The opinion of the python community after almost 10 (!) years after after the first release is quiet obvious: 3.x sucks!

It's certainly not obvious to me. I've been seeing and hearing great things from/about Py3...

>I just don't know from where all the 3.x apologist appear as soon as there is a discussion

Consider this mind-bender: many people are very, very happy with Py3.

Let's just say that Python 3 is, in fact, slower than Python 2. Performance is only part of what makes a language great. In fact, if you need raw performance, Python is not the language to go. Most of my performance intensive code run with NumPy or Pandas, which is not Python anyway and are not at all affected.

I'm also not sure how you got the impression that everyone thinks Python 3 sucks. The fact that you see "apologist" might mean something?

Funny, I was just wondering where all of these 2.x fans who think that porting to 3 is harder than re-writing everything in Go show up from as soon as there's a discussion. There always appears to be an inherent need to somehow describe choices that make sense for the majority of the community as a complete failure, when they're really working out just fine.

Single threaded single process Python 3 is faster than Python 2 on I/O intensive workloads if you use asyncio effectively.

You need to consider Cython, Celery, and C-extensions such as numpy for performance critical code.

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