Do you have examples for these critical 3rd party libraries that haven't yet been ported?
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, the list gets shorter every day:
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, the list gets shorter every day:
I actually made the decision to run on Python 2 due to unavailability of these libraries for Python 3 about a year ago (I didn't really care about Python before as I primarily used C++/Java/Asm/GLSL/C#/Haskell in the past) - I was deeply shocked by what Py3 did to its own community and still have that weird feeling that Python is slowly killing itself. I didn't want to write my own Amazon and MS Office wrappers in Python 3 anyway and from all platforms available Py2 seemed to have the least amount of troubles (though I had to write some Py3 code for handling advanced TLS properly).
I think the flack Java gets is for not modernizing fast enough, but I think in a way that makes you stop and smell the roses (the roses being many years' worth of badass JVM features and massive flexibility/reliability in software development).
But Ruby & Python (I am an ex-Ruby guy) take this cutting edge thing wayyy too far & end up with a community of people who can't trust them anymore cuz they all had their damn feet shot off. Sometimes I see the rates for Ruby guys & wonder if they're high cuz its so productive or just cuz its very niche & the stack is shite. On principal, it's hard for me to imagine going back down that road after experiencing the JVM (plus, I'd like to get away from web one day...).
EDIT: Funny thing I just realized actually -- all the Ruby rates I've seen tend to be exactly on par with a lot of FUBAR niche near-extinct Java technologies. The only people I've seen do better than both these camps are down & dirty Linux/Oracle/Java guys. Maybe my view is skewed but I always feel like the rock-solid langs will live on & eventually "modernize" (though lets be real, modernize is kindof a BS term for slim API & lots of MVC tutorials). These other techs are at the mercy of market trends.
And to be fair, neither language is the prettiest, shiniest and fanciest for it's time, but they get the darned job done.
Take Jax-Rs is a good example. Once you understand it you're just like "Ohhhhh this is the same way Rails/whatever framework handles json requests but I can add in all this non-linear logic without forcing it to play nicely within a presumptuous design pattern". Adding many data sources & logic flows is easy.
Bottom line is that I feel like Java can never really be the next C because fundamentally its much safer and becoming way more human readable. It toes the line well -- you can code minimal stuff similar to the scripting languages, or you can drop years of work/research into optimization for high-transaction algorithms knowing that the platform won't abandon you.
(By the way, I am personally hoping for Clojure or node.js to take over the front-end of the stack & then just using Java to do any heavy lifting that is left over)
For many people in eCommerce and banking the arrival of Java was a "manna from heaven", as before they had to deal with the crazy complexity of CORBA and similar technologies. Java simplified this significantly and added at the time modern easy-to-program and fairly safe multi-threading that allowed software like Apache etc. This made Java famous and gave it a "huge karma" amongst developers. Without Java we probably wouldn't have experienced the massive expansion of eCommerce, and now we are lucky to see all the Java's issues - a good problem to have ;-)
Java and JVM as a consequence have their share of problems that arose from initial design decisions such as type erasure (which .NET's CLR avoided) that still deforms all languages based on JVM to this day. Massive boilerplating, J2EE's unreadable XML mess, complex design patterns invented to cope with the limitations of the language are some of the other problems. The compatibility with the old code is still there though.
I've never played with Ruby, I've heard it's still used by many young web companies for their frontends (like SoundCloud) and have heard they had some release that broke most of the compatibility which alienated many of their users. From this and from Python's example I would suggest keeping both the old way and introducing the new ways in parallel so that developers don't have to rewrite/reinvent the wheel when somebody decides to change a part of the language. This served C/C++ pretty well, adding slowly new features and instead of forcing users to use the "current right way", they allowed to live multiple different approaches together. I think that would have served Python well as well - even Py3 feels at places like a hack, similar to Py2.
I mean, yeah, the list is getting smaller. That's understood. But that doesn't render the problem of depending on only-Python 2 libraries moot.
I think the fundamental insight of the OP is that Python X (the purgatory corresponding to code compatible with both Python 2 and 3) is an absolute pain to write. There's plenty you can do to make Python X easier (like the `six` library or ignoring Python 3.{0,1,2}), but the programmer is still left with the burden of writing code compatible with both versions.
There's just no denying that the Python 3 transition is a huge fucking pain that is costing people tons of time and money. With that in mind, it is absolutely reasonable that people are resisting the change.
gevent is ported, but not in an official release.
There is a mysql alternative module.
mechanize is ported, but not in official branch
nltk alpha3 for python 3 is available
There are python3 thrift ports, but the maintainers are slow.
(N.B. I seem to recall someone telling me that gevent had been ported over a year ago and that all that remained was to just make a release. So count me skeptical until the port is complete.)
And that's just the most popular projects. Imagine what it looks like with the less popular projects? It isn't pretty. This is what the OP was talking about with the "tail" of Python projects.
N.B. I don't personally have this problem with less popular projects. I've always done my best to avoid depending on unmaintained or inactive projects because they tend to rot as time goes on (irrespective of massive changes like Python 2 and 3). But plenty of other people have this problem and it's definitely not an unreasonable problem to have.
I'm pretty sure that, the monkey-patched way most people use it, it's a happy accident when gevent even works correctly on Python 2. This happy accident doesn't happen in an unofficial fork.
File "/usr/lib/python3.2/site-packages/twisted/internet/_sslverify.py", line 1389
self._cipherString = u':'.join(
^(Twisted 14.0.0, installed with pip)
And it's getting better everyday.
These are really HUGE and I can not do my work without them.
It is not dying. It just gets better.
If the libraries are used by people, they tend to get ported. Like most of the most popular packages, and 4799 packages listed on pypi.
Any others you depend on? I'm prepared to roll up my sleeves and help.
This is affecting other parts of Ubuntu, as we don't always install python2 anymore after porting all the default apps to python3. The lack of python3 launchpadlib means apport (the automatic bug reporting tool) doesn't work on some installations.
edit: porting launchpadlib requires first porting lazr.restfulclient, which might be genuinely challenging: https://bugs.launchpad.net/lazr.restfulclient/+bug/1000801
Perhaps the way the entire question should be thought of is: are there actually many properly useful Python 3 libraries that are not available in Python 2?? I bet the above equation would look much better when inverted.