[Python-Dev] Python 2.x and 3.x use survey, 2014 edition (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Sat Dec 13 07:13:20 CET 2014

On Dec 13, 2014, at 12:40 AM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote: So that's basically it, lowest common demoniator programming where it's hard to look at the future and see anything but the same (or similar) language subset that I'm currently using. This is especially frustrating when you see other languages doing cool and interesting new things and it feels like we're stuck with what we had in 2008 or 2010. That's what happens when you want to support a version of Python that was released in 2008 or 2010. Perhaps the impetus for people to move onto Python 3 has to come from people like you saying "I'm not going to support 2.7 any more as of version X.Y", and letting them run two interpreters. It's really not that hard to keep 2.7 around for what expects it, and 3.4/3.5/whatever for everything else.

I don’t think this option is really grounded in reality.

First of all, it's essentially the route that Python itself took and the side effects of that is essentially what is making things less-fun for me to write Python. Doing the same to the users of the things I write would make me feel bad that I was forcing them to either do all the work to port their stuff (and any dependencies) just so they can use a newer version of my library.

It also I think is incredibly likely to backfire on any author who does it unless the thing they are writing is absolutely essential to their users AND there are no alternatives AND it's essential that those people are using a new version of that library. If all of those things are not the case, you're going to end up with a majoritity of users either just stop using your tool all together, switching to an alternative, or just sticking with an old version. I don't think I'm unique in that I like writing software that other people want to and can use.

I think it also assumes that people are writing one off scripts and things like that which only use the standard library. I tend to write libraries and work on complex distributed systems. I need to either port the entire stack or nothing. I can't run half of my process in 2.7 and half in 3.4.

It's also something I've never had to do in Python before, I've always been able to "follow" with the things I write. I could take a look at, or estimate, the amount of users that dropping an older version of Python and I could say that it was time to drop support for that version because very few people are actively using it and the cost of maintaining support for that version is no longer worth it. This is the same process I go through for any backwards incompatible change I make to the things I write and when I drop the old compatability shims. Ironically all versions of Python 3 combined are low enough that if they were the old versions and not the new versions I'd probably drop support from them for now. Really the major reasons I support them at all is because I hold out hope that maybe at some point it will become the dominant Python and because I try to be a good member of the ecosystem and not hold back the adoption.

Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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