Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by zmj on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:10AM
(#3748453)
Good point. Having to deal with portions of old code is better than not being able to use new features at all. I've revised my opinion.
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by aviraldg on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:16AM
(#3748469)
FYI, Python has an automated script for migrating code from Python 2.x to Python 3.x
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by moonchrome on Saturday March 24, 2012 @12:40AM
(#3748506)
You should tell Django guys they should be thrilled to hear it.
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by aviraldg on Saturday March 24, 2012 @01:19AM
(#3748567)
Django already has a branch with support for Python 3.x. The only reason why they're holding off on deprecating older versions is so that users get enough time to upgrade their systems.
A lot of hosting environments like Google AppEngine still do not support Python 3. The "there's going to be no 2.8" PEP might help that, though. We can only hope.
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by vinayan3 on Saturday March 24, 2012 @03:28PM
(#3750428)
I found it half funny that Python 3.3 reintroduced the unicode string literal for Django. The only way support will come is if user push their providers to get up to speed. It is such a pain that Python has become forked for all practical purposes.
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by joshcartme on Saturday March 24, 2012 @10:26PM
(#3751506)
Here's an interesting blog from the Django developers about their plans for python 3: https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2012/mar/13/py3k/
The short of it is that they are planning to move for sure and with each release of Django they drop support for one of the 2.x releases of python. Django 1.5 (the next major version) will experimentally support python 3.
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by moonchrome on Sunday March 25, 2012 @03:56AM
(#3752016)
I was being facetious - my point is 2to3 has been around since py3 was released and Django was python 2.x only for years, along with many other libraries, implying that porting is a bit more involved than applying a script :)
Re:Poll: What's Your Favorite Programming Language?
by soc88 on Saturday March 24, 2012 @06:28AM
(#3749036)
I don't understand the points about Scala here. Scala has pretty much the same strategy as C#.
In fact, the "big breakage" in Scala everyone loves to cite was the addition of better collections. Just like C# did in 2.0 and now finally drops the old non-generic ones with WinRT/Metro.
The reason it gets so much flack is that Java developers want _binary compatibility_, because that's what they are accustomed to and Scala gets often used by Java developers. Java developers would target the same criticism towards C# if it would run on the JVM.
In fact, C# deals excellently with legacy code. While, unlike the JVM, .NET is not binary backward compatible (allowing some excellent language improvements that Java still has not managed to pull off), it is nearly (but not entirely) source code backward compatible. Sure, this allows to old code using old constructs to stay alive, but it works. That alone is pretty unique, especially if you see that nearly any other language either does not manage to move its community to the next version with breaking changes (Python 3, PHP 6) or has tons of compatibility issues every time something changes (Ruby, Scala), or simply is at a standstill (Java).
Having to deal with a DictionaryBase child class which was made before generics were added is way less of a deal than not being able to upgrade your software to the newest version of the language at all. Which is what would've happened if this was done like Scala. Or, if it was done like Java, we'd still be hacking DictionaryBase child classes.
I'd maintain that no language/platform deals with legacy code better than C#.