<story><title>Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule</title><url>http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>trimbo</author><text>I&apos;m kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly.  You can&apos;t upgrade a major installed base overnight unless there&apos;s incentive.  Windows Vista, for example?&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it has stumbling blocks towards achieving the upgrade.  Packages you&apos;re using aren&apos;t upgraded, you have a lot of code dealing with strings, and so on.  I worked on a project that tried to use Python 3.x and it was a nightmare in both regards.&lt;p&gt;In my view, Python 3 doesn&apos;t offer any major reasons to upgrade other than we&apos;ve been told to.  Someone tell me:  what is it that&apos;s so compelling about Python 3?  For instance, when you click on &quot;What&apos;s new in Python 3&quot; on this page, the first thing in the list is &quot;print is a function&quot;.  Seriously?  The FIRST thing in the list is something that breaks code and has very little impact.  Unicode has a lot more impact, breaks a lot more stuff, and is doable in 2.x anyway, yet is the 5th or 6th thing in the list.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;m not really sure what the devs were thinking with Python 3.x.  It broke a lot of stuff but didn&apos;t break enough to make Python notably better.  I was around and a heavy Python user for the 1.x -&amp;#62; 2.x upgrade.  That was far easier, had some features I could really use, and there was a much smaller installed base.  This time around, I just don&apos;t see the reason I should upgrade.  Eventually, I imagine I will when support is so far gone that there&apos;s no choice, or there&apos;s some amazing feature that requires it.&lt;p&gt;For those of you who will respond: &quot;So don&apos;t upgrade, or switch off Python&quot;.  One of those is mission accomplished.  The other one remains to be seen, though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sho_hn</author><text>I haven&apos;t written any code that doesn&apos;t run on Python 3 since 2010. I&apos;m in the comfortable position of generally getting to use Python 3 for new projects (my library dependencies are met), and when I don&apos;t, the shared subset of Python 2.7 and 3 is useful enough to get the job done.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s lots of reasons I find coding in Python 3 more enjoyable and productive. Unicode by default, removing x*() functions and returning generators where appropriate instead, removing old-style classes, improved consistency in standard object interfaces/protocols, standard lib cleanups, etc. Yes, even print() - keyword args are a lot nicer than the old hackish syntax for things like the output file.&lt;p&gt;These are often called minor and &quot;no compelling reason to upgrade&quot;, but I&apos;d submit that when a language does more often what you expect it to do, when the number of gotchas you need to keep in mind is reduced significantly, that&apos;s not minor. It might not be a reason to switch a large existing codebase over, but it&apos;s certainly a reason to write the next large codebase in it, and that&apos;s what Python 3 aims at: The future of Python and its future users.&lt;p&gt;No, that doesn&apos;t make for a fast transition, but indeed, it was never expected to be (&quot;five years&quot; is the plan, we&apos;re not there yet, and things look to be on track). Eventually, there just won&apos;t be any reasons left not to use Python 3, but plenty of reasons to do so (the better core language, the sum of improvements in the standard lib, the continued maintenance), and then it&apos;ll be done.</text></comment>
<story><title>Python 2.8 Un-release Schedule</title><url>http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0404/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>trimbo</author><text>I&apos;m kind of surprised people are surprised that upgrading to 3.x has gone slowly.  You can&apos;t upgrade a major installed base overnight unless there&apos;s incentive.  Windows Vista, for example?&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it has stumbling blocks towards achieving the upgrade.  Packages you&apos;re using aren&apos;t upgraded, you have a lot of code dealing with strings, and so on.  I worked on a project that tried to use Python 3.x and it was a nightmare in both regards.&lt;p&gt;In my view, Python 3 doesn&apos;t offer any major reasons to upgrade other than we&apos;ve been told to.  Someone tell me:  what is it that&apos;s so compelling about Python 3?  For instance, when you click on &quot;What&apos;s new in Python 3&quot; on this page, the first thing in the list is &quot;print is a function&quot;.  Seriously?  The FIRST thing in the list is something that breaks code and has very little impact.  Unicode has a lot more impact, breaks a lot more stuff, and is doable in 2.x anyway, yet is the 5th or 6th thing in the list.&lt;p&gt;So I&apos;m not really sure what the devs were thinking with Python 3.x.  It broke a lot of stuff but didn&apos;t break enough to make Python notably better.  I was around and a heavy Python user for the 1.x -&amp;#62; 2.x upgrade.  That was far easier, had some features I could really use, and there was a much smaller installed base.  This time around, I just don&apos;t see the reason I should upgrade.  Eventually, I imagine I will when support is so far gone that there&apos;s no choice, or there&apos;s some amazing feature that requires it.&lt;p&gt;For those of you who will respond: &quot;So don&apos;t upgrade, or switch off Python&quot;.  One of those is mission accomplished.  The other one remains to be seen, though if Tiobe is at all believed, Python is declining sharply in interest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drats</author><text>I am not sure about now, but another point is that when Python 3 was released it was slower as well, so there was hardly a reason to swap for very minor changes and no libraries. Python 3 should have been something radical like PyPy or large changes to the standard library.</text></comment>