I know it shouldn’t, but the python community’s bizarre behavior during the 2.X -> 3.X move honestly made me think less of the language.
Tech is supposed to just be tech, but when the community behaves this badly about adopting improvements how can that not influence your decision to invest in that tech? If 2.X -> 3.X was such a drama fest what’s gonna happen next time they need to upgrade? Etc
I work with code that uses a lot of files in a lot of different text encodings. Some are XML, some plain text, and some binary. Coming from other languages, Python 2's Unicode support was very difficult to work with, and my team was excited to move to Python 3, until we actually had to do the work.
Long story short, Python 3's str/bytes separation was a nightmare, especially when having to deal with third-party libraries that were expecting one or the other. This was especially true for libraries that came from Python 2, and were still expecting strs as function parameters when they should have switched to bytes. There was so much encode() and decode()ing going on that we occasionally caught ourselves getting them backwards in code reviews. We took a step back to see if we were just architecting things poorly, but no, we were doing things the best we could for our problem domain.
In the end, we traded one set of Python 2 text encoding footguns for a mostly different set of Python 3 text encoding footguns. It's not like Python 2 was great. Having a single str type instead of the str/bytes separation is worse in theory. But because Python 3 didn't design the separation of those types well enough, and still has a ton of text encoding footguns. It wasn't better enough to really justify all the work that went into the conversion.
In a different direction, I don't know what your problem domain is/was, but in general when I'm dealing with UTF8, I don't need to convert back to bytes very often. Was the need for conversion mostly due to the libraries that still expected strings instead of bytes?
I should also say that we were working with files in tons of encodings, not just UTF-8. We had UTF-16 and UTF-32, both little and big endian, with and without BOMs, but we also had S-JIS and a bunch of legacy 8-bit encodings. Often we wouldn't know what encoding a file was in, so we'd have to use the chardet library, along with some home-grown heuristics to guess.
Off the top of my head, the two biggest footguns are:
- There should be no way to read or write the contents of a file into a str without specifying an encoding. locale.getpreferredencoding() is a mistake. File operations should be on bytes only, or require an explicit encoding.
- .encode() and .decode() are very poorly named for what they do, and it wasn't that uncommon that someone would get them backwards. Sometimes, exceptions aren't even thrown for getting them wrong, you just get incorrect data.
Both of which were still issues with Python 2. There's a valid architectural argument to be had between the Python 2 way, where str was a bag of bytes, and the unicode type was for decoded bytes, and the Python 3 way, where the bytes type is your bag of bytes and str holds your decoded string. I favor Python 3's way of doing it, but it's almost six of one, half a dozen of the other. The advantages of one over the other are slight, and given how many library functions relied on the old behavior, it was probably a mistake to change it like that, rather than continuing the Python 2 way, and fixing issues like those above that caused problems.
I think the P3 string/byte ecosystem was made substantially weaker by P3 deciding not to lean more into types (something I have complained about on here before!). Like...they are the only values where the stdlib is extremely specific about you passing a value that has the exact right type, but the standard tools for tracking that are pretty poor.
Isn't that the point? String and bytes are different beasties. You can often encode strings to bytes and just about anything accepting bytes will accept it, but the converse is not true. Bytes are more permissive in that any sequence of any 0x00-0xff is acceptable, but str implies utf8 (not always guaranteed, I've seen some shit), meaning e.g. you can dump it to json without any escaping/base encoding.
I'm curious to know what you mean. How would you improve the design?
b = b"some bytes" s = u"some str" foo = b.to_string(encoding) bar = s.to_bytes(encoding)
or
foo = str(b, encoding) bar = bytes(s, encoding)
I also mentioned that I think there shouldn't be any mechanism to read or write files to/from a string without specifying an encoding. locale.getpreferredencoding() is a mistake.
But one thing I didn't mention that I think would improve the design would be to make it harder to treat str as the bag-of-bytes type it was before. Swift took some steps down this path, and honestly, it made it much less pleasant to work with strings, but a bit safer. I would hope that a better design could be found.
This may be controversial, but I don't think you should be able to just subscript a str type. instead of s[1], you should be writing s.codepoints[1] or s.graphimeclusters[1], etc. depending on what you actually want. If str is truly a string type and not a bag of bytes, it should deal with the extra complexities that being a string brings to the table.
Interesting thought on subscripting strings. It would be hard to make it fly after all these years of habits, but I see your reasoning.
But I disagree with you about the separation of bytes and string and the current state of the language. I write a lot of python that deals with bytes and text encoding, and now that all the libraries have caught up with 3, the situation is way better than it ever was. encoding, decoding, bytes manipulations are way less prone to errors.
And, as I said, I do prefer the str/bytes split over the unicode/str split, but I also wasn't doing a lot of raw byte manipulation. I agree that it was harder to do with the old str than bytes. I was mostly doing string operations on the grapheme cluster level, and then writing everything out as UTF-8, so I didn't see as much of the benefit.
Reading your comment feels like "I don't like Python for being Python", more or less. Apologies if I misread.
I'm also an advocate for using the right tool for the job, and in this case, Python may not have been the right tool for this job, but this was only one component in a much larger system. Sometimes you have to be suboptimal locally to be optimal globally.
And it's not like Python couldn't handle it, it was just that it had some design decisions that made things a bit harder than it would have been in some other languages. We got it working pretty well in Python 2, then the Python 3 transition happened, and it was a lot of work to get everything working as it had been, for only a small benefit to our team, but we got it working in 3 as well, and to my knowledge, it's still humming along.
There weren't that many people who were outright against Python 3, other than Zed Shaw for a few years. It just took until Python 3.4 for the language to really be usable in production, and after that it took a couple more years for every library to be updated. But the community has been pretty unified for 5+ years at this point.
The problem as I remember it was that there were some critical tools that just were not making the switch. The last one I could remember having to have a separate runtime for was graph-tool, but there were just a ton of them in the scientific computing community. Also, I don't think making print a function was worth it. So many people had muscle memory on that that personally I think it was worth just single casing it.
Weren't there a lot of major performance regressions in the first couple versions?
If it matters I've been writing Python professionally for more than 15 years and I started my career by seeing the (less famous) Zope2 to Zope3 botched migration. When Python3 was first announced I had hoped that the devs behind the project had learned from that related experience, guess I was wrong.
Sure, but they accomplished this mostly by displacing anyone who disagreed. That's fine, and Python 3 in a vacuum is a better language than 2. But I'd never make the mistake of choosing Python for a serious project going forward.
The migration was difficult because you had to actually think about this stuff instead of it working by accident and living as a landmine if you encountered non UTF-8 text.
The fact that you actually have to decode your bytes and specify an encoding makes it really obvious when you’ve just assumed the world is UTF-8 without really backing it up.
The print() change drives me nuts: many scripts use the old form, and Python forces you to change it despite recognizing the old functionality. They could've simply allowed print expr to work as is and accepted it as a wart.
The async stuff feels a bit like a bridge too far for me WRT the language. Simplicity would be standardizing on a function color (as it were).
I don't envy their position of preserving backwards compat while evolving the language.
Old print isn't an expr at all, that was a major point of the change.
They made print a function out of a misplaced sense of language "purity", where they made a random ideal and broke code to support it.
Let's compare to JS: 20 years of new features and old code still works. Keywords were added, and old code still works. Even code that uses those keywords still works. It took more effort from the language implementers, but that's as it should be: it took a bit more effort for a few teams (who make the engines), instead of a large amount of effort for tens of thousands of groups.
For me it was more than "just the tech". Python 3.x was not the Python 3000 I was promised for a long time: many of the additions did not warrant breaking changes (as demonstrated by the backports) and many of Python's deeper warts still remain unaddressed, even today.
I think the deeper issue is that at the rate that 2.x got popular, the original motivation, principles and process behind the language's development got diluted. The orchestration of the push for 3.x adoption was not technically motivated in a convincing manner and signaled a change in the process. I stopped trusting the process.
And I hope that python learned from 2 -> 3 and that in the future it will be better
For the vast majority of companies, python 3.x is not better enough for the cost. That is what happened. You may think it's awesome. It may be technically better it, etc. But the cost of moving was much more for most companies than the productivity gains. We've even measured it before. That is entirely on the python folks for not providing something people want enough to move to. All CSAT surveys of python i've seen at my company, and that my counterparts had ever seen, said literally the same thing. So it seems like something the community could have discovered pretty easily in a rigorous way if they wanted. I used to spend a lot of time on python-dev. It's a group of good people and engineers for sure. There was always good rigor around technical reasons to do something, and around performance benchmarking. But i don't remember seeing a lot of productivity research or CSAT or .... It's fair to point out that most OSS communities don't do that, but that's a bad thing, not a good one, and one of the things that often leads to community trouble
One of the other major factors, besides the productivity issue, that makes it not better enough is the migration cost. Software of this kind needs to be built to be migrated from and to. If not, it's broken and you deserve all the animosity you will surely get from your users. It doesn't matter if you screwed up the language, etc. Tough crap.
In python, for lots of folk with substantial stacks, the amount that could be auto-migrated by the tooling provided was low - 40-50%. Yes, simple stuff could be auto-migrated, but not most real stuff.
We actually ended up building our own tooling to get closer to 70% because how expensive the overall thing. It processed many millions of lines of python code, automatically kept track of which things would be best to rewrite/finish migrating first (because it would unblock other things), and continuously tried to auto-migrate any non-migrated changed code in a loop to maximize automation. The total engineer cost of moving was enormous. We are talking well over a thousand SWE years.
For what, exactly? As I said, we already measured (because plenty of new projects were python-3 only) and determined that all the improvements and hullaboo did not meaningfully improve productivity for people. Not enough. It was small, at best. It also didn't reduce the rate of production bugs, etc.
So all this work, for no meaningful value.
Because not enough were willing to do it, the result was to force it. Damn the users, full steam ahead. The users are just lazy.
I talked with lots of counterparts at other companies - most felt the same way. The result for us is lots of teams gave up python forever. The only reason it's growing at all is because of ML.
IMHO, python2->3 is an object lesson in doing it wrong and then victim blaming.
This was definately an opportunity for commercial software, i am not sure why companies worth hundreds of billions can't sort this out and expect a small nonprofit to provide this.
What the "larger user" (however you want to frame it) community would have preferred (IMHO) is much better migration tooling, even if it came at a cost of improvements.
The dev community chose to spend time on improvements instead. That's their choice, but it doesn't make the community wrong to be upset about it.
Why didn't you just take over support of python 2.7?
I'd have gone for 'rigor mortis', but hey, we can't agree on everything ... like, say, a very minor change to string encoding with a 12-year managed rollout.
That's exactly the point: it required a massive amount of effort for relatively minor benefits.
A lot of the scripts were supporting processes that had a finite lifespan during the initial stages when the company infrastructure was being built out, rather than ongoing operational processes that needed to be performed indefinitely, so hopefully they'll be able to set a lot of that codebase on fire instead of maintaining or porting it to python 3.
What you say was bad about it? And who were the bad people specifically? The people who were using python 2 or python 3?
For what it's worth, python3 >= 3.0 && python <= 3.2 were hideously broken in their unicode support. Arguably had worse/unusable uncode relative to python 2.6 or 2.7.
So there was a huge failure to launch type of problem, especially given how long python3 had been development.
It most definitely left a very sour taste in many people's mouth that didn't start dissipating till 3.5 or 3.6 when enough "killer" features had accumulated.
Even then, for a lot of usages, python 2.7 'just works'.