If as a community we invest in those tools and make them easier to build, the cost of upgrading goes down and the velocity of high-impact changes can increase.
JavaScript evolves quickly but so does Python!
(Note that your approach is exactly what they said in the 2 to 3 transiton btw with a special tool that didn't work too well)
For example, is this code thread-safe?
foo(int* x) {
int z;
for (int* y = x + 1; y != 0 && *y < *(y - 1); ++y) {
z = *y;
}
return z;
}
But I think they're referencing the litany of transpilers and repackagers which exist for js. So you can add new features and then still have it run on really old systems like internet explorer 9 if you need to.
This has problems obviously and in my opinion for python it would be preferable.
My reasoning being that if you need your code to work on an older system being able to write and use current syntax is preferable to not, and the hard bifurcation that python did with 2 to 3 and now potentially with 3 to nogil seems to me just to break apart the ecosystem more.
https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod
It sounds like what you are describing is what’s known as poly fills which convert code into a variant that maximizes function across implementations which isn’t really applicable here.
Ironically this is also from Meta which would be contributing to this space increasing the expertise of achieving this result.