Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/

by Toddward • 14 years ago

110 97 14 years ago

polemic• 14 years ago

Heh, PEP 404. Nice.

marchdown• 14 years ago

For some reason, adoption has been really slow so far; it is disappointing to see so many beginners pick Python 2 over 3. I believe that even MIT and Coursera teach Python 2.

eli• 14 years ago

Can you blame them? It's what experienced Python developers are using in the real world and there are orders of magnitude more tutorials for Python 2.

sho_hn7• 14 years ago

This is one reason I like to recommend Lutz' book to beginners. Aside from generally being rather decent and thorough, it also teaches Python 3 and how Python 2 differs from it (rather than the other way around, or ignoring Python 3 altogether), resulting in a full, useful education on both, but from the right vantage point.

sateesh• 14 years ago

I like the Lutz's book. I think if there is a version of the book which covers only Python3, that would be a great start for a person who is absolutely newbie to Python. For a Python beginner I think the constant reference/comparison and going back and forth (in the book) between Python 2 and Python 3 would be rather distracting.

Deinumite3• 14 years ago

One of the issues is that almost every Linux distro is still shipping 2.7+ (and with good reason, there's a lot of code that won't run in 3.0 still).

I think now that 2.7 is the last we will start to see a bit more migrate.

Edit: I didn't mean they aren't shipping 3.0, but that the default is still 2.7.x

sho_hn7• 14 years ago

That's simply not true, unless perhaps you actually mean "almost every Linux distro" (i.e. including the bulk of distros that have a whole of five users and release once in a blue moon).

The fact is that almost every major distro is shipping Python 3, and often has been for several releases/years: Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Gentoo, ArchLinux ... and many of these also have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of Python 3 libraries packaged.

If you mean that /usr/bin/python still points to Python 2 on most of these (in fact all of them except for ArchLinux): True, and that is unlikely to change, possibly never. It's my understanding that this is in keeping with upstream's wishes (from discussions on python-devel and python-porting): bin/python is to remain Python 2 with python3 being the right way to run the Python 3 interpreter.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

Arch moved to python3 well over a year ago.

Python2 is still in base-devel, but /usr/bin/python symlinks to python3, not python2.

sigzero• 14 years ago

To be fair, Guido laid out a 5 year process for it and we are just over half way. There is actually movement now as libs get moved over.

johnthedebs• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, it was intended to be a slow transition (3-5 years) since it's a chicken/egg situation because of backwards compatibility.

The good news is that adoption should pick up very quickly after this fall. Python 3.3 will make it easier to port Python 2 projects and provide more incentives to upgrade. There's also nearly a critical percentage of major packages ported, and Django (which is still on Python 2, and is a deal breaker for many people) will have experimental support for versions up to 3.3.

I expect that by this time next year, the default for most new projects will be Python 3.

thong• 14 years ago

agreed. Django is a major reason why adoption hasn't been quicker up to now.

notatoad• 14 years ago

adoption hasn't seemed slower than reasonable to me. there's been steady progress in porting packages over to it, and until the packages you need are there there isn't much point in using python3.

bgalbraith2• 14 years ago

I do a lot of scientific computing in Python and have had awful experiences with Python 3. We encourage everyone who comes into our lab to work with 2.7 because the libraries are all there. It's true that Numpy and Scipy now build for Python 3, but another key library, PIL, is lost in limbo with no clear timeline for porting last I checked.

The only reason I've used Python 3 at all was because of project involving blender. I needed to do in-memory JPEG compression for quickly streaming images from the game engine. In Python 2, this is a couple lines of code using PIL. Instead, I ended up having to write my own pyjpeg module that provided a ctypes interface to a custom libjpeg-based compression library. I'm proud of the result, but the aggravation and frustration that entailed has removed any desire I have to move to Python 3.

JonAtkinson• 14 years ago

I don't see why the irresponsible maintainership of PIL should reflect badly on Python 3. Pillow is a fork of PIL which was created to address some of these problems:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow#why-a-fork

melling2• 14 years ago

As a Perl guy waiting for Perl 6, I never understood why Python devs were waiting. I'd talk to Python guys and they'd say some library or another was missing. Then I would explain how exciting it was to have a breaking version that fixed defects and warts, and in general making the language better. Of course, I'm still waiting for Perl 6 plus another 5 before adoption. Oh well, I'm glad someone is finally moving ahead.

Jach• 14 years ago

As a non-Perl guy, I thought it was supposedly clear that Perl 6 is a completely different language than Perl 5 and isn't meant to replace it? So I don't think Perl 5 : Perl 6 :: Python 2 : Python 3 is really that analogous...

melling2• 14 years ago

Perl 6 will have a Perl 5 compatibility mode. Yes, it's a more ambitious effort and it's a loose analogy. However, I don't think there's a need to have both Perl 5 and 6. It's meant as an evolution to solve the same kinds of problems. Perl 5 came back to life after it became clear Perl 6 was going to take even longer, and it's adding some of the improvements from Perl 6.

Anyway, the observation is to note how long it takes to get people "upgrade" when "breaking" changes are made to languages.

ff0066mote• 14 years ago

I've been using Python2 now for 4 years but have been dragging my feet upgrading to Python3.

Finally, I started learning it just a month ago and now I don't know what ever stopped me before. In fact, the most annoying thing I've found about Python3 is that my searches for documentation on DDG or Google all go to the Python2 docs.

backprojection• 14 years ago

My impression is that the slowness to adopt python3 is mostly about fashion than anything else, not that there aren't solid, technical reasons to stay with python2. The main thing for me is availability of numpy/scipy packages for python 3.

baq• 14 years ago

s/fashion/fear/ with a small pinch of missing libraries, as you said (btw i hear numpy is getting there.)

ec429• 14 years ago

Three shall be the version of the Python, and the version of the Python shall be three. Version four shalt thou not use, nor shalt thou use version two, excepting that thou then upgrade to three.

Perl 5 is right out.

manojlds• 14 years ago

Love that it is 404 :)

veyron• 14 years ago

There really should be an effort to get people to write new code in python3 and use 3to2 to backport (rather than writing in python2 and using 2to3 to convert).

bdarnell• 14 years ago

The biggest obstacle there is the lack of setuptools/distribute integration. It's easy to run 2to3 at install time when your source distribution is python2, but there's no support for going in the other direction.

trimbo7• 14 years ago

I'm kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly. You can't upgrade a major installed base overnight unless there's incentive. Windows Vista, for example?

Additionally, it has stumbling blocks towards achieving the upgrade. Packages you're using aren't upgraded, you have a lot of code dealing with strings, and so on. I worked on a project that tried to use Python 3.x and it was a nightmare in both regards.

In my view, Python 3 doesn't offer any major reasons to upgrade other than we've been told to. Someone tell me: what is it that's so compelling about Python 3? For instance, when you click on "What's new in Python 3" on this page, the first thing in the list is "print is a function". Seriously? The FIRST thing in the list is something that breaks code and has very little impact. Unicode has a lot more impact, breaks a lot more stuff, and is doable in 2.x anyway, yet is the 5th or 6th thing in the list.

So I'm not really sure what the devs were thinking with Python 3.x. It broke a lot of stuff but didn't break enough to make Python notably better. I was around and a heavy Python user for the 1.x -> 2.x upgrade. That was far easier, had some features I could really use, and there was a much smaller installed base. This time around, I just don't see the reason I should upgrade. Eventually, I imagine I will when support is so far gone that there's no choice, or there's some amazing feature that requires it.

For those of you who will respond: "So don't upgrade, or switch off Python". One of those is mission accomplished. The other one remains to be seen, though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.

sho_hn7• 14 years ago

I haven't written any code that doesn't run on Python 3 since 2010. I'm in the comfortable position of generally getting to use Python 3 for new projects (my library dependencies are met), and when I don't, the shared subset of Python 2.7 and 3 is useful enough to get the job done.

There's lots of reasons I find coding in Python 3 more enjoyable and productive. Unicode by default, removing x*() functions and returning generators where appropriate instead, removing old-style classes, improved consistency in standard object interfaces/protocols, standard lib cleanups, etc. Yes, even print() - keyword args are a lot nicer than the old hackish syntax for things like the output file.

These are often called minor and "no compelling reason to upgrade", but I'd submit that when a language does more often what you expect it to do, when the number of gotchas you need to keep in mind is reduced significantly, that's not minor. It might not be a reason to switch a large existing codebase over, but it's certainly a reason to write the next large codebase in it, and that's what Python 3 aims at: The future of Python and its future users.

No, that doesn't make for a fast transition, but indeed, it was never expected to be ("five years" is the plan, we're not there yet, and things look to be on track). Eventually, there just won't be any reasons left not to use Python 3, but plenty of reasons to do so (the better core language, the sum of improvements in the standard lib, the continued maintenance), and then it'll be done.

trimbo7• 14 years ago

Honest question though: do you think that, given all of the breaking changes and toughness of upgrading, _even more_ should have been broken in this release to improve the language?

I guess that's my most major beef with it. The upgrade has been tough, and a lot of the most inconsistent aspects of Python weren't fixed. (A good example: "len()")

BTW, I tried using Python 3 on that project in 2010, if that helps anyone gauge my opinion on it.

drats• 14 years ago

I am not sure about now, but another point is that when Python 3 was released it was slower as well, so there was hardly a reason to swap for very minor changes and no libraries. Python 3 should have been something radical like PyPy or large changes to the standard library.

sho_hn7• 14 years ago

There were large changes to the standard library :). The big io rewrite, for example (which was also one of the reasons for the slowdown initially as it was implemented in pure Python; it eventually got rewritten in C and should be faster than before now).

Anyway, I think it makes more sense to major-version language than implementation changes. In theory CPython vs. PyPy shouldn't matter to code.

nessus422• 14 years ago

I'm kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly.

I'm kind of surprised that people think people are surprised that the upgrade to Python 3 has gone so slowly. After all, Guido himself has stated on numerous occasions that the migration would take many years to complete. The time to complete this transition is not so much of a problem for a language that plans to be around for the indefinite future. After all, the future is much longer than the past.

kamaal9• 14 years ago

This still doesn't solve the problem of users who wish to start a project in Python now.

Should they work with 2.x which is going to go away, or 3 whose ecosystem is not ready yet.

smeg• 14 years ago

Coudlent agree more. Py3 was/is a shocking disaster. All this work and effort for nothing...except crap that most people dont care or know about...like how Unicode strings a dealt with internally and stuff.

Things that would have made Py3 enticing to me: - JIT - Real GIL improvements (no changing from op-slicing to time-slicing is not a real improvement) - Better OO. Roles, traits, enough with the duck-typing. - Anonymous subroutines/multiline lambdas. Creating closure generators is too much work in Python compared to Perl. - Tail recursion - More stuff that will come to me after I click "submit"

Daishiman• 14 years ago

Whoa whoa, Unicode is huge for users of internationalized libraries and internationalization packages. I think you're underestimating the importance of this.

JIT and GIL are not language features, they're implementation details. Once alternative implementations catch up, many will look at this again.

The other things are considered to be language features by many, have been discussed to death by developers and users alike, and are unlikely to be changed or modified any time soon.

kamaal9• 14 years ago

though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Java script seems to be going strong. Python has fallen by 3 places and has the maximum drop in ratings among top 20 languages.

Python is right next to Perl.

Since according to many Pythonistas and the references they used to point to in the past when they talked of Perl, Perl was dead for the same metrics which Python has now.

    1. A major revision whose ecosystem isn't ready.
    2. Current stable widely deployed version is going to go away soon.
    3. Fall in ratings.
    4. Fall in usage.
    5. Rise of new languages like clojure.

And since now Python has the same metrics and is next to Perl.

Can we say Python is dead? It must be since TIOBE says so!

kamaal9• 14 years ago

To everybody who is downvoting this, this is heights of hypocrisy and fanboy'ism.

I am just applying the same principles to Python what used to be applied to Perl.

And more importantly there is data to back up everything that I said.

reinhardt2• 14 years ago

TIOBE also says Delphi/Object Pascal is more popular than Ruby. Also where do you get the "Rise of new languages like clojure" from? Certainly not from TIOBE, it's not even in the top 50, which sounds about right (btw it's not that hard to have 1000% rise if your starting point is like 0.0001%)

gbog• 14 years ago

> Python is declining sharply in interest

Maybe it is only me, but I feel the number of Python-related articles is higher than ever on HN.

trimbo7• 14 years ago

You took what I wrote out of context. I wrote "if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining...". I wasn't postulating that I have evidence of it other than to say Tiobe has indicated that.

Though, it'd be interesting to write some code to pull language interests off HN. It would be an interesting experiment. Granted, HN is a tiny subset of the programming community, but it would be interesting nevertheless.

andraz• 14 years ago

Great reasons to upgrade.

But they should also mention they are taking away our beloved print and quick string formatting.

wladimir• 14 years ago

To be precise, print is now a function instead of a statement. It has not been taken away. Just add parenthesis.

The string formatting syntax did indeed change, but the new syntax is just as "quick" as the old one, just different (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/517355/string-formatting-...).

yason• 14 years ago

THis isn't surprising. Python 3 was advertised, back in the time, as "mainstream, please don't bother yet, we'll do a few more 2.x releases while letting the community catch up with jumping through the hoops of Python 3".

That is, at the same time when they removed some tried and true language constructs people liked and didn't add more of any powerful features that everyone was hoping for.

I bet Python 2.x will dominate for a long time, possibly with PyPy w/ LLVM becoming the de facto implementation instead of the discontinued CPython. Also, another party will at some point continue developing the 2.x line further.

kamaal9• 14 years ago

I've tried to push Python for many projects at our shop. But it always get shot down by We don't want to write in 2.x series as its going to go away, and 3.x ecosystem isn't ready yet.

The more this continues, the more some technology is going to eat Python's lunch.

If Python wanted to break backwards compatibility they should have done so with some big major changes. That would have been justifiable. Right now no one sees a reason to break backwards compatibility to go to a no-so-ready ecosystem at the expense little gains. At the same time no wants to write 2.x either.

At least people planning to maintain their code base for years aren't going to write in a major version that's going to go away.

gaius3• 14 years ago

In addition, integer division now produces floating point numbers for non-integer results.

Grr.

rplnt2• 14 years ago

Well, that makes sense, doesn't it? Not in relation to prehistoric programming languages, but in relation to humans. I'd imagine it's hard to think about programming language without comparing it to others... but try it. Why would 5/2 be 2 and not 2.5? That being said, you can (still) use //.

gaius3• 14 years ago

Because int/float conversions are not free! It is hidden, hard-to-reason-about computation that now, you have to explicitly look for.

omaranto2• 14 years ago

I agree with your grumble, division of integers with a non-integer result should give an exact rational number, not some messy floating point approximation. Clojure does that, for example.

Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule

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