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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

The core problem is they didn't break ENOUGH.

Thus Python3 failed (and frequently, continues to fail) to be a compelling upgrade to anyone but unicode purity fetishists.

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I am not a "unicode purity fetishists" and python 3 has been a compelling upgrade for me for the past 3 years. I have not written single line of python 2 code since 2 years ago. So your statement that it is not compelling for anyone is wrong. Maybe some people are python 2 fetishists? I have upgraded multiple python 2 codebases to 3 and I am not understanding what people are whining about, it is not rocket science.

This is something people are getting paid to do; maintain their codebase and keep it up-to-date.

Because no one could ever be justified in moving to Python 3 for AsyncIO, f-strings, ordered dictionaries, assignment expressions, pathlib, new features in shutil/tempfile/subprocess/etc, along with massive improvements to memory consumption, runtime performance, and overall stablility?

Was there something about the design of Python2 that would have prevented these features? Honest question.

Probably not, but I’m still glad they did clean up. They could have done more.

Until 3.8 py3 was slower than py2 in practically all benchmarks, and 3.8 is a marginal improvement at best. So I’m slapping a massive <citation needed> on your “massive” performance improvements

We switched a service from 2.7 to 3.5 and saw an immediate 45% reduction in memory usage and 20% reduction in runtime. That's massive IMO. We saw further (but smaller) performances benefits upgrading to 3.6, again when upgrading to 3.7, and expect to see even more with 3.8.

https://youtu.be/0kXaLh8Fz3k?t=322

People can and have been fine without those things for a long time. Many of them could have been added to Python2 without any trouble. And yet we still have a GIL.

>>Thus Python3 failed (and frequently, continues to fail) to be a compelling upgrade to anyone but unicode purity fetishists

Huh? No new project of any note is using 2. Everyone has either upgraded to 3 or never even learned 2 to begin with.

Incorrect. There is tons of Python2 code being maintained, added to, and working diligently in production.

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