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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

That list actually seems genuinely pretty minimal. Reading your comment I was expecting a long major list of changes, but it's only 3 things, most of which seem relatively unlikely to impact most programs, with the possible exception of dictionary sort order.

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Really? The lack of Unicode strings immediately disqualifies this for most things I've worked on the last few years. No emojis, no diacritics, no non-US users. Ok for internal tools for American companies with an older workforce, I guess, but I wouldn't use this for anything that takes input from the general public (e.g., customers).

I suppose I'm thinking more about data science / engineering oriented things, since that's what I tend to use Python for.

The list of small things are for data structure. However, the language is a lot less dynamic than Python:

> Since Codon performs static type checking ahead of time, a few of Python's dynamic features are disallowed. For example, monkey patching classes at runtime (although Codon supports a form of this at compile time) or adding objects of different types to a collection.

While monkey patching is maybe not done so much in Python (outside of unit testing), adding objects of different to a collection is definitely a common operation!

From what I understand, this will be possible in the future with implicit union types. Wouldn't work with _arbitrary_ types, but with a set of types that can be computed at compile time (my guess is that this is possible in most real-world cases).

That list is minimal. Elsewhere there's the no heterogenous lists and no biginteger restrictions, and it looks like import doesn't work either. Presumably no heterogenous dictionaries either - so not only unordered, but also simply typed.

Read the entire page. Those three bullet points aren't the extent of it. This is like the difference between Ruby and Crystal; the same syntax, similar culture, but they're fundamentally different languages.

> …with the possible exception of dictionary sort order.

Which is an implementation detail that is not guaranteed by the language standard.

Porting code from 2 to 3 made me have to use a sorted dict because the code relied on the insertion order (metaclass magic operating on the class dict) but when they revamped the dictionary implementation I could do away with that fix. Until they come up with a more efficient dict and break everyone’s code again.

Does make me want to dust off the old spark parser and see what this can do with it.

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