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Comment by iveqy | Hacker News Reader

Very nice writing except the python part. Just 2to3 really have been a maintenance pain for me. The hardest part with script languages to actually know if somethings is wrong or not without extensive testing.

Writing something maintenance free should be done in a compiled language.

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I think it is not necessarily about being compiled versus interpreted. It is more about static typing, and the type-related issues being revealed and fixed right at the beginning instead of only when the user invokes the problematic branch of code at runtime.

On the other hand, one of most long-lived and apparently low maintenance pieces of software I've ever used so far has been GNU Maxima, which is not written in a statically typed language.

> Very nice writing except the python part. Just 2to3 really have been a maintenance pain for me.

I agree. I could have been talked into getting onboard with Python for long-term low-maintenance projects if only they didn't burn everybody with the backwards compatibility. I understand of course why the changes were made, but it doesn't make it any easier. It's not impossible that 3 -> 4 will do the same.

I was wondering the other day whether something that is already dead might make a better scripting language. For example, you haven't got to worry about any random changes to the COBOL language! I suspect something like JS is pretty much at maturity now with WebASM poised to replace it.

I doubt 3->4 will be too much of a shock, iirc the only planned breakage will be switching annotations to have delayed evaluation so annotations in things like classes can reference the thing that's not yet defined

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