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Comment by pelario | Hacker News Reader

I cannot agree enough.

As a casual python user, it is quite common to stumble in some issue, after somme googling land in a doc page, try my solution, and find it does not work. Then googling after the failed solution, noticing that the previous doc page was describing a Python 2 feature that do not exists (or works different) in Python 3.

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Me three! It happens all too often that an example Python script fails in one, then succeeds in the other. I'm also a casual Python user, trying to ramp up because of its obvious popularity and utility. I wish that the basic syntactical changes could have been designed to be more backward-compatible. But, eventually I suppose, python2 will just be a footnote in history.

Same situation here. Trying to jump on this bandwagon and finding it's a slithering target.

I just wish they'd named it something different. If there's neither forward nor backward compatibility, I'd argue they're not the same language and should not have the same name.

Most languages have had breaking changes at some point in their history. Even the language known as "Perl 5" had them in almost every version.

In the real world, I've found Perl scripts written in 1999 (and poorly - as they were written by me in my teens) will still run in 2019. It's basically the policy that even language mistakes won't be undone:

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpolicy.html#BACKWARD-COMPATIBIL...

I'm afraid it will forever remembered as a cautionary tale of a bad transition.

This issue is part of why Haskell is so hard to learn. Haskell's package database Hackage keeps all old deprecated incompatible versions of packages, with documentation pages all well indexed by Google, with higher page rank because they are longer lived than the current package version, with no indication that they are deprecated and incompatible with current Haskell deployments.

Try Hoogle.

Hoogle has its own problems...

This is also the problem haskell stack solves

"Haskell. The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

"Stack" is the name of a product; it wasn't a generic reference to "the Haskell stack".

It really shouldn't be beyond the wits of the hackage developers to include a normative URL in old docs...

I keep forgetting how have python one liner of a http server. And always when Google the python2 version will appear and always to play with the search term to get it.

python3 -m http.server

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