Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: python is getting worse and worse with every release.

Back then you couldn't run scripts that were written with python2 - sure, they made a major version bump, that's how semver works in practice.

But now you can't even trust python code to work between minor versions. There was a python3 script that read out bluetooth details (like battery level) that I used a few years ago. Some months ago I found it again, but it stopped working due to some dropped api. I see that this version removes some apis also (the "deprecation" section should be actually "breaking incompatibilities with previous versions") - whatever you wrote with python 3.11 (or earlier) using these apis, all of those programs are broken now.

Whatever you write in python runs today - but no one promises that it will run tomorrow also.

(And I won't even get ranting about the overall direction, that makes it resemble more to C++...)

View on HN

> that's how semver works in practice. > But now you can't even trust python code to work between minor versions.

Python doesn't use semantic versioning: https://docs.python.org/3/faq/general.html#how-does-the-pyth...

(And I won't even get ranting about the overall direction, that makes it resemble more to C++...)

Could you give some examples of this?

What was the bluetooth api that disappeared? Did it not print out depreaction warnings?

I'm sure it was printing out some warnings in that 6 years when I was not using it. It wasn't my script. It's somewhere on the internet in a random github repo, created by a random internet guy many years ago. All I remember that I wanted to use it again a few months ago, and it took like an hour of datamining by the time I figured out why it doesn't work anymore. Something got removed between Python 3.2 and 3.9, that was essential for this script.

Of course this is not the only example. It bites me at least once a month: I try to use some random python project from the internet only to find out that I'm using too new python. If I really badly need it, then it is time to set up a VM with an ancient python version. But usually I just give up, and look for a non-python solution. If it has never ever happened to anyone, then I guess I might be the only person using python in this world regularly.

But this is pretty much my point. Python3 scripts die if you try to use them with Python3 - today's python3 doesn't give a damn about yesterday's python3. Python3 scripts rot faster than milk on the sun.

I've got no sympathy, since you keep saying 'random script off the internet'.

When you say datamining, what exactly do you mean? I've never had to datamine a codebase. It's not a database.

Using the wrong terms for stuff generally flags someone for me as having no idea what they're doing. Definitely not a reliable narator so to speak. I can equally hear you say 'I haven't used this car in 6 years and it wont drive now'.

It's also pretty redflagish that you're not actually giving any specifics. Like was a module in the standard library removed, or was this a third party thing. I wonder because you said it was related to bluetooth.

That's not to say early python 3 wasn't a mess. It was, but that's certainly resolved now.

> set up a VM with an ancient python version

Maybe just use virtual environment?

  > Tell me you don't know what's a python virtual environment without telling me you don't know what's a python virtual environment

Of course you know that also that Python virtual environments are used to handle/isolate different python packages and their versions on top of the system-wide python installation, and not different versions of python runtime, so I won't even mention it. Of course in theory you can have as many different python version installed as you want on the same system, but whoever suggests that has never tried having more than 1 intentionally. I'm sure you were only joking with that post. Haha. I get it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com