"My concern, and IMO what should be the overwhelming concern of the maintainers, is not the code that is being written, or the code that will be written, but all the code that has been written, and will never be touched again. A break like this will force lots of python users to avoid upgrading to 3.17, jettison packages they may want to keep using, or deal with the hassle of patching unmaintained dependencies on their own.
For those Python users for whom writing python is the core of their work that might be fine. For all the other users for whom python is an foreign, incidental, but indispensable part of their work (scientists, analysts, ...) the choice is untenable. While python can and should strive to be a more 'serious', 'professional' language, it _must_ have respect and empathy for the latter camp. Elevating something that should be a linter rule to a language change ain't that."
Strongly phrased, but planned obsolescence in a language is really expensive. You're basically quietly rotting the work of your users, and they will hate you for it.
I note that C# basically hasn't deprecated any of the language itself, the dotnet core transition was a big change to the runtime. And that was expensive enough, again due to dropping a lot of old libraries.
But they can simply continue using whatever version of Python works for them, right?
I never got this argument, personally. Sure, having to rip out a bunch of code because of lang-level changes can suck, but you also only really need to do that if you're starting a new project anyway or for whatever reason want to keep being pinned to @latest version of the lang.
If you're a researcher who uses Python 2 as a means to an end, then just stick to Py2. It's unreasonable to expect the entire python world to freeze in place so you don't have an annoying migration journey. If you need the latest Py3 features, them's just the brakes I'm afraid, eventually APIs need to change.
No, because features get added to new versions of Python, and libraries they need to use may depend on those features. “Just don’t upgrade Python” is advice that’s only going to last a finite amount of time before introducing pain points and/or risk.
Did you see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41788026 ?
"My concern, and IMO what should be the overwhelming concern of the maintainers, is not the code that is being written, or the code that will be written, but all the code that has been written, and will never be touched again. A break like this will force lots of python users to avoid upgrading to 3.17, jettison packages they may want to keep using, or deal with the hassle of patching unmaintained dependencies on their own.
For those Python users for whom writing python is the core of their work that might be fine. For all the other users for whom python is an foreign, incidental, but indispensable part of their work (scientists, analysts, ...) the choice is untenable. While python can and should strive to be a more 'serious', 'professional' language, it _must_ have respect and empathy for the latter camp. Elevating something that should be a linter rule to a language change ain't that."
Strongly phrased, but planned obsolescence in a language is really expensive. You're basically quietly rotting the work of your users, and they will hate you for it.
I note that C# basically hasn't deprecated any of the language itself, the dotnet core transition was a big change to the runtime. And that was expensive enough, again due to dropping a lot of old libraries.