[Python-Dev] (Looking for) A Retrospective on the Move to Python 3 (original) (raw)

Alex Walters tritium-list at sdamon.com
Fri Apr 27 00:02:14 EDT 2018

http://pyvideo.org/pycascades-2018/bdfl-python-3-retrospective.html link to Guido’s talk, for your convenience

From: Python-Dev <python-dev-bounces+tritium-list=sdamon.com at python.org> On Behalf Of Guido van Rossum Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2018 6:12 PM To: Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> Cc: Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org>; Python-Dev <python-dev at python.org> Subject: Re: [Python-Dev] (Looking for) A Retrospective on the Move to Python 3

Also see my talk at PyCascades and Victor's upcoming talk at PyCon.

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018, 12:02 Brett Cannon <brett at python.org <mailto:brett at python.org> > wrote:

On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 at 10:19 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org <mailto:barry at python.org> > wrote:

On Apr 26, 2018, at 09:28, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com <mailto:ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com> > wrote:

On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 10:25 AM, Eric Snow <ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com <mailto:ericsnowcurrently at gmail.com> > wrote: In pondering our approach to future Python major releases, I found myself considering the experience we've had with Python 3. The whole Py3k effort predates my involvement in the community so I missed a bunch of context about the motivations, decisions, and challenges. While I've pieced some of that together over the years now since I've been around, I've certainly seen much of the aftermath. For me, at least, it would be helpful to have a bit more insight into the history. :)

It would certainly be an interesting document, but I suspect you’ll get a bit of the old “ask 3 lawyers and get 5 opinions” kind of response. ;)

As I remember it, there was definitely a feeling like, this would be our only chance to clean up some annoying cruft, and rectify some (in hindsight) incorrect design decisions made over the years, couple with a healthy dose of “we have no idea how to do the bytes/str split in a backward compatible way". There was probably a sense that the Python community was just small enough to be able to handle such a disruptive change, but wouldn’t ever be so again. The latter is definitely true today, even if the former was overly optimistic.

I agree with everything Barry said. There are some lessons in hindsight of how we could have handled bytes/str, but it was more of a decision of "really long transition versus a short one" -- jokes on us for what "short" became ;) -- which we simply won't make ever again.

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