My problem with this post is not its factual accuracy. It's factually accurate, downright impressive.
My problem is with its premise. That premise is that Python 2.7 people need to be somehow educated. To be shown some kind of light. It's the same premise that the project leaders have been going on about for 7 years. "Can't you see how much better this is?". Worse: "are you 2.7 people stupid, or what?".
It hasn't worked.
Why hasn't it worked? Not because 2.x people are slow or uninformed. They're very well informed. They assess the merits and downsides. They've had 7 years!
The reason is a combination of inertia, but also, many people actually think that in many ways, 3.x is a regression. If you don't need Unicode, Unicode is a huge pain in the xxxx. I was just having to mess with "b"s everywhere today on strings over msgpack to a non-pythonic endpoint. Lazy ranges (can also be) a huge pain in the bt. So I must move to 3.5. For what? Type annotations? Asyncio? I've been using (the highly impressive) Tornado for 3 years on 2.7.
Now google brings out the brand new TensorFlow. On 2.7. "But porting to 3 is their #1 priority" I'm told. Okay cool. You wait. I won't.
So the advances of 3 meet the regressions of 3. Even if you believe the net is positive in 3's favour, that net is not nearly enough to persuade people with actual lives outside of computer science, to port years of code, and more importantly, to port their brains to work with the new dispensation. Python is a language for people who want to get things done. 2.7 gets things done. Zero problems. For many people, that's the killer feature.
My problem is with its premise. That premise is that Python 2.7 people need to be somehow educated. To be shown some kind of light. It's the same premise that the project leaders have been going on about for 7 years. "Can't you see how much better this is?". Worse: "are you 2.7 people stupid, or what?".
It hasn't worked.
Why hasn't it worked? Not because 2.x people are slow or uninformed. They're very well informed. They assess the merits and downsides. They've had 7 years!
The reason is a combination of inertia, but also, many people actually think that in many ways, 3.x is a regression. If you don't need Unicode, Unicode is a huge pain in the xxxx. I was just having to mess with "b"s everywhere today on strings over msgpack to a non-pythonic endpoint. Lazy ranges (can also be) a huge pain in the bt. So I must move to 3.5. For what? Type annotations? Asyncio? I've been using (the highly impressive) Tornado for 3 years on 2.7.
Now google brings out the brand new TensorFlow. On 2.7. "But porting to 3 is their #1 priority" I'm told. Okay cool. You wait. I won't.
So the advances of 3 meet the regressions of 3. Even if you believe the net is positive in 3's favour, that net is not nearly enough to persuade people with actual lives outside of computer science, to port years of code, and more importantly, to port their brains to work with the new dispensation. Python is a language for people who want to get things done. 2.7 gets things done. Zero problems. For many people, that's the killer feature.