Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitboxer | Hacker News Reader

Django is not ready for python 3.x right now. The support for 3.x is in "beta" right now. I hope when the final 3.x support is released, a lot of more traction is going on towards 3.x . The current state is pretty bad :(.

View on HN

My use of python in the enterprise is way bigger than the Django world.

That said, it's not that bad, even with Django. I think you over-estimate the current state of affairs. Six will be bundled with Django 1.5. By 1.6, I am confident that Django will be 3/2 compatible. Until then - I'm not hurting by running 2.7. Seriously, it's just not a problem. No angst.

If I overestimate it, why do all python devs I talk to still use 2.x and say that they can't use 3.x because all kind of problems?

GVR said to expect a five year migration. We are four years in. Major projects like NumPy have had support for a while. Pyramid supports it. Django has good enough support that library authors can start migrating their changes. Python 3.3 took out a major source of 2/3 conflict by putting u"" strings back. It would not surprise me to see a lot of newly updated code be 2.7/3.3 or greater as a result, but it will hasten the conversions.

All in all, with a year left in the migration path, I'd say we are doing OK. The VM is in good shape for production use and the libraries are coming along well.

I think the biggest danger is all the hand-wringing about how everything has gone wrong, who didn't read the fine-print to start.

A question I have is how the duck can a language like C# introduce TONS of changes from 1.0 to 5.0, including major syntactic, semantic and library features, and still be widely adopted, whereas Python has to have a "five year migration" for what are essentially some minor language changes.

They were not minor changes, though they might appear to be so from the outside looking in. The unicode changes alone are significant enough to require a significant refactoring of existing code - due to the monkeying around that was required to properly deal with Unicode in 2.x.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com