This exaggeration of Python3 migration is ridiculous and frankly has become boring. Yes, Python 3 broke compatibility. But we had more than a decade to migrate. It definitely does not deserve to be the poster child for migrations gone wrong.
The main issue is not that I give you X amount of time now please fix it coz you have generous time now.
The cost of such a change is ENORMOUS.
As an example, in a recently IPO'd company we had a team of engineers and we had 6 months of work for 10 engineers, round the clock, to fix the Python 2 to Python 3 migration issues alone! and the original creators of the code were long gone! .. and I could only imagine the plight of thousands of other folks in similar boats and other resource constrained boat-less entities!
Then there are distributed packages and libraries that are used by a large set of audience that are dev complete and no longer maintained as such. The cost of fixing those are much much higher.
It makes one more than wince at the thought of going through this exercise again.
And if one of your dependencies started using new features from 3.x it would break everyone stuck on 2.7, so you can't even use the new features in your library. So why would you bother migrating? So everyone was stuck in a game theoretical position where there was no first mover advantage because one straggler would invalidate all the investment.
Clearly not, as most libraries are now Python 3 only, so the switch did happen.
I do see a lot of people complaining but I see no practical solutions being suggested. "Just don't do a breaking change" isn't a practical solution when the problem being fixed was such a core feature of every language, strings.
You don't build a convincing argument that the python developers did nothing wrong when saying this 1.5 years after python 2.7 has been EOL.
>I do see a lot of people complaining but I see no practical solutions being suggested. "Just don't do a breaking change" isn't a practical solution when the problem being fixed was such a core feature of every language, strings.
A system should have been put in place to allow python3 code to import python2 code. Then people have an incentive to actually run python3 and use python3 features.
More people are stuck on Java8 which has been EOL for a very long time. They are often stuck because Android hasn't upgraded afaik. But Java11, 14, etc can use almost all Java8 code unless it uses I think sun.misc.Unsafe or something like that. The point is that people can use modern Javas with Java libraries targeting older versions.
Try shipping python3 scripts to systems that only have python2 interpreters. Doesn't work very well unless you also start to ship the interpreter and all its dependencies. I learned my lesson and just avoid distributing any Python code to customers now.
Docker tends to be the easy solution for all this stuff, and it's language agnostic.
> Doesn't work very well unless you also start to ship the interpreter and all its dependencies.
That basically applies to everything that isn't a statically linked binary.
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/08/01/how-the-gnu-c-...
Every time libraries and compilers advance, you're effectively porting all the existing code. You have to fix any build breakage, and re-validate everything.
Moreover, Python is a C program. Just get the old Python 2 C code and compile it against "the same version of libc you're running" and it will work, right? Where is the problem?
I didn't care about Python 3 features, but you can't run Python 2 code on a Python 3 interpreter either and the Python 2 interpreter was abandoned. Meanwhile you can run ancient JavaScript code on both old and modern systems, ancient C++ on both old and modern systems, ancient Java mostly on both old and modern systems, etc. .
> Docker tends to be the easy solution for all this stuff, and it's language agnostic.
I think I will rather go with statically linked binaries before I dump docker on unsuspecting users. Just the pain of getting that dependency whitelisted by their corporate IT makes my skin crawl.
Every person saying "pythonic" instead of idiomatic would need to switch to "booshy" instead. The file extension would be .og (for old Greg).
Only pair programming would suffer as the main philosophy of the language would we coding in isolation.
Well, that, and the constant drinking of Baileys from a shoe...
I'm also sure they wouldn't have migrated.