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Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by nas on Thursday July 12, 2018 @01:19PM (#17516696)
> The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest.

It's not. Python 3 has overtaken 2 and there is no stopping migration to it now. Python 3.7 is a lot better than 2.7. Just on memory use alone, 3.7 is massively better. Sure, there will be some hold outs on 2.7 for a long time. That's fine.

Also, this is not the say that migration from 2 to 3 was handled well. It wasn't. Python 3.0 should have had backwards compatible features like allowing the 'u' string prefix. Indexing byte strings should have returned length one byte strings. Byte strings should have supported at least a minimal amount of %-style formats. Etc.

That has all been mostly resolved and is in the past. Mistakes were made because, shock, the Python core developers are not perfect and didn't foresee all the migration issues. However, there is no way that we are going back and reviving the Python 2.x branch.

Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by olooney on Thursday July 12, 2018 @02:40PM (#17517416)
It was touch and go for a couple of years there but yeah, Python 3 is now well and truly over the hump.

The Python 3 Readiness Project now lists [341](http://py3readiness.org/) of the 360 most common packages as Python 3 compatible.

Even that's underselling it really. For example it lists BeautifulSoup as not converted, but the link goes to BeautifulSoup 3.2.1. However, BeautifulSoup4 works great on Python 3. And for MySQL there's mysqlclient and several others, and since database packages usually follow PEP 249 pretty closely its very easy to switch. So in reality, rather than 341/360, its more like "everything worth converting has been converted." Or just "everything" for short.

Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by mistrial9 on Thursday July 12, 2018 @04:03PM (#17518146)
false imperative => "Python 3 has overtaken 2 and there is no stopping migration to it now. "

this shows a superficial, almost entertainment-industry sort of view of a software development lifecycle..

in the latest Ubuntu Bionic with apps, building right now on a local machine, I see 143 python-xx packages installed and 43 python3-xxx ..

saavy package authors use import future and six to side-step the whole issue, while core maintainers struggle, and outsiders invoke a mob voice

Python 2.7 for LTS

Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by TylerE on Thursday July 12, 2018 @02:18PM (#17517214)
How much momentum was lost in the transition though? I know that with the pain of 3 at the time a lot of people started looking at languages like Go or even Scala.
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by lenocinor on Thursday July 12, 2018 @09:21PM (#17519883)
Python currently still 4th at https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ . As the most popular scripting language on there by some margin, I'd say they're still doing pretty well.
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by cwyers on Thursday July 12, 2018 @06:35PM (#17519190)
That's not the point of the person you're responding to. They didn't say that the transition didn't happen. They said it's not yet known if it was worth it. All you're saying is that it happened.
Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by nas on Thursday July 12, 2018 @07:24PM (#17519438)
I'm saying it happened and Python 3 is the language I want to use. If you don't do Python 3, you either keep the error prone str/unicode string model or you dream up some way to evolve to a better model. Would some mythical version of an evolved Python 2.x be better than what we have? I mean, how to argue against that? I haven't seen anyone propose a workable migration plan. Python 3.7 is better than 2.7.15 and better than 'tauthon'.