Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshuamorton | Hacker News Reader

> I... don't even know what to make of this advice. Have you ever worked for an engineering organization with more than 5 members?

Yes.

> Without a clear, business-first reason for an engineering project of that magnitude, it's not ever going to be a priority or a realistic option.

I'm not suggesting that there is any realistic solution. I'm simply stating that the cause of your pain isn't py2 to 3, but bad development practices that existed independent of language or migration. These were going to cause you pain at some point no matter what. It just happened that py3 was the forcing function, as opposed to something else next year.

View on HN

While I won't deny that there were some unfortunate design decisions made in the codebase (some very questionable choices were made at some point), I think that's inevitable in any codebase of a certain size and age that's been worked on by enough people in a company that's changed substantially a number of times.

But that's not the cause of my pain. Bad code can and will be written in Py2, Py3, or any other language. The cause of my pain is that the language developers chose to abandon work on the language that we use in favor of a different language, one that is fundamentally different in some important ways. As a result, the tooling and ecosystem on which we've built our product is slowly stagnating and is getting close to being fully disfunctional.

If you have bad code you'll eventually feel the cost of that bad code, if the code lives for any significant length of time. Something will make you feel that pain, either a new feature you need to develop or a change to the ecosystem, or something else entirely.

If not py3, then something else. Specifically, the tooling ad ecosystem isn't dysfunctional, you're just unable to maintain functionality among changing requirements. "We must use py3 for our codebase" isn't particularly different from "we must now support Japanese users" or "we need a new endpoint that allows us to view data along a new axis". All 3 changes had the potential to cause you developmental pain. You just hit one prior to the others.

>> The cause of my pain is that the language developers chose to abandon work on the language that we use in favor of a different language

Oh now language devs are responsible for your lack of industry practices?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com