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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

The mistake of python 3 must never be forgot.

"Mistake"? There was 2to3, a clear timeline, and a migration path. Compatibility forever drags along tech debt the way Microsoft did. On the other extreme, Apple is guilty of breaking things too aggressively without enduring compatibility. Major version incompatibilities with clear advantages is righteous churn, so it's a narrow path that must balance competing concerns.

Perl 5 -> Perl 6 is the oddball without a migration path because they're totally different.

2to3 was a bungle. Python 3 was dead until six came out, which had an actual plan for upgrading that works (forward compatibility) instead of automatic rewriting, which does not work.

> On the other extreme, Apple is guilty of breaking things too aggressively without enduring compatibility.

Apple views that as a good thing.

That's Apple's arrogance.

The mistake was the way it was handled. I'm not sure Python trod that narrow path well - not all the breaking changes in Python3 were clear advantages, especially in the pre-3.5 days, the migration path was harder than necessary as a result, and the timeline was clearly too aggressive with hindsight.

Python got very lucky with their strong community support. Millions of hours were invested into upgrading Python2 code to Python3, essentially on trust in the early years (2009-2013).

Without the strong community support Python could have gone the way PHP did in the 5 -> 7 -> 8 era

It's interesting to compare these with languages that never did the breaking change to clear out their tech debt. Back in the day, Javascript was nearly universally hated (The Good Parts was very controversial!), and it nearly splintered into multiple languages, but managed to consolidate under ES5 and then explode in popularity without ever having a Python2-3 moment.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/python-developers-survey-2020/

Scroll down to Python Versions

They clearly did something better than Java. 94% vs 6% (and that was 2020!)

You're comparing 12 year old Python 3 (as of 2020) with 6 year old Java >=9 (as of 2023).

6 percent of people in 2020 were using Python 2, 12+ years after Python 3 was released. 12 year old Java right now is Java 7, which is only used by 2 percent of people in this link.

It was painful, but most of the community doesn't consider it a mistake.

Keeping Python 2 for long was a mistake, it had too many inconsistencies.

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