Old Man Yells At Cloud

[Paul Rubin]

Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info> writes:
> Having to spend a few hours being paid to migrate code using "print x"
> to "print(x)", or even a few months, is not a life-changing experience.

Didn't someone further up the thread mention some company that had spent
1.5 years porting a py2 codebase to py3?

The issue of breaking the print statement isn't the difficulty of
converting old programs, or that the print statement is superior to the
print function or vice versa.  Reasonable people might believe that one
is slightly better than the other, but it would be hard to argue that
one is overwhelmingly better than the other.  So there's not a
convincing reason to change.

That calls the whole py3 movement into question, since its advocates so
vigorously defend unnecessary changes.  It's fine to fix broken stuff
(Unicode was broken, indexes escaping list comprehensions was broken)
but fixing highly visible stuff that wasn't broken makes the more subtle
changes easier to ignore.

Py3 imo would have been more successful if it introduced even more
breakage, but produced dramatic benefits (for example a 10x speedup) as
a result.  That would have been doable.  Instead we got minor benefits
and useless breakage.  Py4 as a result of learning the wrong lesson
won't break anything, so it won't be able to introduce dramatic benefits
either.  Will the 5th time (Py5) be the charm?  (I don't mean Pycharm).

Python is gaining ground in numerics and data science, which is great.
Micropython for embedded MCUs is also poised for popularity.  I don't
know how Python is doing at general systems stuff which is what I mostly
use it for.  I think Ruby is losing ground, and some of the ground it
has lost has been to Elixir.  An Elixir-like reimplementation of Python
might be an interesting avenue to pursue.  So would a dialect with less
pervasive dynamism than Python, but that could be compiled to fast
machine code with traditional Lisp techniques.  The dynamism would still
be available "opt-in" so you could turn it on when you wanted it, and
only those parts of your program would slow down.