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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I think python 3 just has a severe branding issue. I bet if you took python 3.4, removed the stuff that will egregiously break things (IE, lack of a print statement and new exception syntax), and just called it python 2.8 everyone would be pretty happy with it.

All the same, I'm continuously amazed at the arrogance of the people that maintain the language and set its direction. It's no wonder it's been a colossal failure. You know why I'm not running python 3? Because it doesn't solve a single problem I have. It doesn't solve anyone's problems. It solves imaginary problems, while creating real problems.

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If it were only syntax, 2to3 would be the answer. Exceptions and Print are not the problem. Migrating unicode-aware code and CPython extensions is a much bigger task, and incidentally, much more useful.

nonlocal, asyncio, unicode, yield from. If you ask me, these four are very compelling reasons to switch to Python 3 and they solve very real problems.

Those 4 things are really just nice-to-have features though. I can work around all of those with minimal effort (asyncio and unicode), or it just doesn't come up much (yield from and nonlocal)

To me, a compelling feature is a pypy like jit, or fixing the Gil, or lamdas that don't suck. For things like that, I'm willing to break the ecosystem. But for sorta better Unicode? Ha!

There are not so terrible workarounds for all the things you mentioned. While Py3K does them better, they are still not reasons to update. As the article points out, there isn't a compelling reason other than slightly cleaner code. The community agrees as evidenced by the massive push back.

There are not so terrible workarounds for things like functions or variables in assembler. While C does them better, they are not reasons to update.

There are not so terrible workarounds for things like closures and memory management in C. While Python does them better, they are not reasons to update.

There will always be neophiles and neophobes...

Unicode support in Python 2 is broken. That is not a imaginary problem for me. Unicode in Python 3 is much cleaner and robust.

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