Re:Python 2 Removed from Debian
by yjftsjthsd-h on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @03:06AM
(#34229048)
> The actual migration should you choose to do it was almost trivial. The official conversion script did most if not all the work. The changes were all cosmetic, like "print 42" changing to "print(42)".
If that were it, it'd have been over a lot sooner. For some packages, bytes vs Unicode strings was bad. For many more, layers of dependencies were an impediment. The trivial stuff wasn't the problem.
Re:Python 2 Removed from Debian
by rich_sasha on Tuesday January 03, 2023 @03:21AM
(#34229138)
For some, sure.
But for example a big stumbling block was the scientific programming community, from which I also stem. There were no major syntactical reasons there and yet people were up in arms, for the reasons I describe above.
Most people I know migrated only when python2 literally wouldnt work for them anymore, like they needed a feature of a library only released for python3.
The actual migration should you choose to do it was almost trivial. The official conversion script did most if not all the work. The changes were all cosmetic, like "print 42" changing to "print(42)".
I'd say the uproar was about the minorness itself. The syntax had these tiny but otherwise incompatible changes, and for many people, for no good reason. Fo example it was deemed that, as in the example above, print shall not be a statement anymore, but a function instead. Why? Unclear. Meanwhile, Python 3 offered few concrete improvements to many users
So I think the 2->3 moan, of which I was a party, was about that: minor, unnecessary changes that introduced little to no benefit, and yet backwards-incompatible.