Summary of Major Changes Between Python Versions | Hacker News Reader

Summary of Major Changes Between Python Versions

nicholashairs.com

84 pointsnickcw22 comments

Wow this is much needed. Thanks! I keep hearing rumors that a no GIL version is coming, I think this is probably the biggest change so far, as it would make the language much more performance oriented. I'm considering a tech stack and thinking about both python and Mojo for ML, not sure that Mojo is stable yet, but the performance differences are HUGE.

As of written, the no-gilexperimental support will come as part of 3.13, due to come out in Oct 2024 (right now, it's in beta)

3.13 release note : https://docs.python.org/3.13/whatsnew/3.13.html

no-gil PEP https://peps.python.org/pep-0703/#backwards-compatibility

Interesting list. I need none of it except the guaranteed dict insertion order!

But of course, I have to learn all of it to understand other people's code. Python's syntax has really gotten worse. The match statement is ugly in comparison to functional languages, I'm not sure about f-strings, the with-statement extension adds new overhead to the reader.

Python is really like C++ now, except 50 times slower (yes, I know about the slow std::unordered_map special case that is due to its rigid specification).

> Python is really like C++ now

Yet there is still a common belief among programmers that “Python is a simple language”. I don’t know how that persists.

Perhaps what people really mean is just that it has “friendly” syntax (no braces, sigils etc) - and they aren’t considering semantics?

f”strings” are really good now.

Agree that match is shite, Python has a Guido-induced antagonism towards functional programming, starting with the opposition to multi-line lambdas, then with the attempted assassination of map() and filter() in Python 3, the removal of argument pattern matching, and now with statement-based match (in 2024!).

I agree with the other comments - f-strings are worth using. Other than that, um, underscores in numeric literals are nice, especially for hex and binary.

I don’t think there’s anything else there that I want to use. But, I recognise that as someone who only uses Python for small dynamically-typed programs, I’m not the target audience for the language any more.

If nothing else, do adopt f-strings. It really makes the code cleaner!

They are on average great, but don't you agree that it's not always better? If the expressions get too long, it gets less readable than splitting the placeholders from those expressions.

This is a tool, for use in certain circumstances. Screwdrivers are great, but you don't always use them.

Some of the linters don't know that and enforce f-strings. I know, we can't let the tools decide but sometimes that's just what happens at a workplace..

IMO @dataclass, and Enum are gamechangers. fstrings are nice too.

The walrus operator is pretty nice to have, the type system is absolutely necessary to improve correctness, and there are a few quality of life improvements that are great too, for example removeprefix().

I agree that f-strings have gone to town with itself. I do like the parenthesis support for with-statement, though: it gives more structural support instead of splitting lines with trailing back slashes--I always have an uneasy feeling about trailing back slashes.

Yes, I also only need 20% of the language. The problem is that everyone needs a different 20%.

As someone who haven't been using Python extensively since college, and mostly use TypeScript and Kotlin at work (and little bit of Rust for hobby projects), that's a lot of typing features. It feels like for the past few years typing been getting more attention. Good to see.

I used to hate TypeScript (circa 2016) because it kept bugging me with typing errors, and I used to sprinkle "any" to shut it up.

https://nedbatchelder.com/text/which-py.html

Ned’s list is what I usually use.

In this snippet

```python if header.startswith("X-Forwarded-"): section = header.removeprefix("X-Forwarded-") ```

the `startswith()` check is unnecessary. If `header` doesn't start with "X-Forwarded-" then `header.removeprefix("X-Forwarded-")` just returns `header`.

Nice summary doc, with good examples. You can also visit [this site of mine](https://ptmcg.pythonanywhere.com/python_nutshell_app_a_searc...) to search for changes by version (3.7-3.11).

Nice overview. Are the performance Advantages mentioned?

I didn't know about the pyupgrade tool. Very useful.

It was nice to see the "annotations" from 3.7 for helping avoid types with circular imports (for types). I didn't know that!

I'd love to see a step further, and avoid the circular import problem entirely. It's something I fight with everything time I work in Python. I find that I am forced to structure my Python programs in a way specifically designed to avoid this instead of what makes sense for organization. Or I will C+P functions if I feel that tradeoff is not worth it.

This is great. Python is my main language and I learned a lot.

The piping and typing changes are so useful ! Bookmarked and I'll be coming back to this often.

I also caught the sleep token references. Well done .

It's incredible to see how much stuff has been added over the last couple of years.

I've missed a lot of these that I'm going to take advantage of!

Happy to see that my gripe with f-strings was solved in 3.12. Now you can have quotes inside it!

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