I see many people vigorously defending Py3 but I wonder how many of these have a paying-the-bills kind of job. Where you would look at the cost of porting a large project to Py3 and get an answer like half a million USD (easily). Do you go "of course we do that, that money is easily recouped with the added programmer productivity of Py3"? No chance.
So the question is do you want to basically light that money on fire, or just keep your perfectly fine Py2.7 code running and maintained another few years.
More discussions of the monetary value of programming languages please. What is "correct" or "right" isn't all that interesting to many, for good reasons.
Kudos to this project and hope it can set us on a saner migration path to Py3. (Should totally change the name though.)
I don't want the CPython core devs to do anything different and are not angry with them at all. It is their pet and they can do what they want. I fully agree with what you say in that sense.
But I do mind people saying in these discussions "you should all move to Py3 now or you are stupid/evil".
No. There are legitimate reasons for staying with Py2.7 and embracing it.
So I hope "Python 2.8" gets a cool name, perhaps even some funding from a company who wants to keep their Py2.7 code alive and invigorated, and the community part as friends.
Is that self-entitlement in any sense?
All I want is for people who I think have a huge blind spot to stop calling me ignorant for decisons I make about MY code. I totally don't expect core CPython devs help me out though.
> I don't want the CPython core devs to do anything different
It's not just CPython, it's the Python specification of which CPython is the reference implementation. The specification couldn't move forward in significant ways without making some of the changes that came with Python 3.
> All I want is for people who I think have a huge blind spot to stop calling me ignorant
The level of vitriol in 2vs3 threads has been way too high from the start, because people always hate change. You are obviously free to do what you want, you always were. Don't mind the haters, but please don't be one either.
> So I hope "Python 2.8" gets a cool name, perhaps even some funding from a company who wants to keep their Py2.7 code alive and invigorated, and the community part as friends.
It has already been explained elsewhere in this discussion by other people, I would strongly advise against that. If you for whatever reason have to stay on 2.7, then make sure your new code is 2.7 only (and best if it works with 3 without changes if you decide to change your mind later).
Consider what's more likely in the far future (after PSF will give up on 2.7 support in 2020). That somebody will support 2.7 as it is, or that this guy will support his Python 2.8 hybrid?
Also consider what happens (in the far future) when some library you use will drop Python 2 support. It's not likely it will be easy to run on this Python 2.8 hybrid, either.
And if you for any reason must use Python 3 features in your code base, just bite the bullet and port it.
What I was hoping for was a sane migration path to prevent the split you talk about in 2020...somebody made a superset of both py2 and py3 that lets one move gradually. If support ends/project dies one would bite the bullet and move all the way to py3 I guess.
My py2 code uses unicode properly which may color my view a bit...
Clearly, "sane" is up for argument. My understanding is that 2.6 was the last version to get major features. Python 2.7's goal was to be a bridge between 2x and 3x[1]--it was that superset where code can run in both. It back ported many of the popular Python3 features (at the time). But that was 6 years ago and Python 3 has had new features since then.
(Looking at this from the perspective of the "Python Community" or someone who's goal is to adopt Python3) His focus is to back port newer Python 3 features developed since then. Does this help people move to Python 3?
Good on him for digging into cpython. While there's __future__ and the backports module, he seems to have focused on features that aren't just new libraries (which is cool). A few years ago I was trying to backport Python 3's Namespace Packages for my company since our internal import tools effectively do the same thing (except our's had bugs).
So the question is do you want to basically light that money on fire, or just keep your perfectly fine Py2.7 code running and maintained another few years.
More discussions of the monetary value of programming languages please. What is "correct" or "right" isn't all that interesting to many, for good reasons.
Kudos to this project and hope it can set us on a saner migration path to Py3. (Should totally change the name though.)