Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

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> This is totally false - code produced by 2to3 no longer ran on 2.

That's what "breaking changes" and "backwards incompatible" means.

What exactly is hard to grasp?

> So you ended up w a chicken and egg problem.

You really don't. Your code and your upstream dependencies need to be ported to python3. Once your dependencies are updated, all that's missing is you doing your job.

Python2 has been on the path to deprecation for how long? A decade?

You're fabricating problems where there are none.

> Your comment is a perfect illustration of the issues. Lots of user blaming.

There is no issue. When I had to port projects to Python3, I just ported them. No drama, no hangup. You're pretending there were problems where there were none, and you're throwing a tantrum when this fact is pointed out to you.

There is really no justification for this. It's high time people like you stop making up excuses and start to own up their misconceptions, misjudgements, and mistakes.

Some projects were rewritten from scratch in entirely different tech stacks in less time the likes of you complained they could not update their projects from python2 to python3.

“It's high time people like you stop making up excuses and start to own up their misconceptions, misjudgements, and mistakes.”

What is it about python 3 that brings out this lecture stuff.

I would really like to see the inside of this “easy” change at even the bigger most well resourced places. Google / Facebook / Dropbox etc.

At small places where a program is working and programmer is gone they are not investing in ports.

Anyways - they did eventually get a clue. It’s much easier NOW to handle this, but it wasn’t at the start. Yes, they did put u”” back in. No it did not destroy the world.

> Yes, they did put u”” back in. No it did not destroy the world.

This saga isn't completely over, over here: We still have code running python2 that we don't have the room to upgrade, and libraries that have to work with both python2 and python3. Meanwhile, people are pushing "code consistency" to the point where people outside our team are taking those libraries and running the "black" formatter on them - but "black" doesn't understand python2, so it removes the "u" prefix and breaks the library.

I like black and python 3 - but that’s pretty funny! In fairness black is opinionated on purpose - even if it understood u”” it’d remove it if it’s targeting 3 probably because it tries to reformat to one style. Amazing how long the ripples last though

>What is it about python 3 that brings out this lecture stuff.

I think some people convinced themselves that using "" without the u"" was disenfranchising to people who don't want to use ASCII to represent their language. This transformed a practical argument over syntax into a moral crusade.

Ok, so what happens when several of your dependencies never ported?

This isn't strawmanning - this is literally the case for a codebase I'm working with today.

You should not be using those dependencies today. Looks like they have been unmaintained for a decade and can contain a ton of vulnerabilities.

Though I find it hard to believe that there are some useful dependencies that have not been ported and don't have better alternatives. Typically a "never ported" dependency is never ported because it is deprecated in favor of something better.

We're in a rather niche market. It's geocoding related stuff that only talks to a trusted endpoint.

Does no one work in a business? Does no one work with science instruments purchased more than 5 years ago? Businesses have lots of useful dependencies that have not ported. If you are running a payroll system and it’s working, there is a real aversion to going to a new code base, and the cost benefit is not there for many businesses. You do realize python 2 is downloaded 3 million times per month now? Yes that’s down - but it’s not nothing - probably 300 - 400 thousand plus users easily

> Ok, so what happens when several of your dependencies never ported?

If you're consuming dependencies which were never updated in the past decade then you have more worrying problems to deal with than porting your code to python3.

That’s not true at all - in high compliance industries if the dependency has been validated and is working changing it brings risk.

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