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Agreed, I think looking at the Python 2 and 3 migration catastrophe gives a glimpse into what this could look like, but I imagine it would be much worse given t
by bruxis 6y ago
Agreed, I think looking at the Python 2 and 3 migration catastrophe gives a glimpse into what this could look like, but I imagine it would be much worse given the types of (large) projects that are backed by substantially "dated" C/C++ code.
- santamarias 6y agoI agree about the "rocky transition" from Python 2 to 3. Still if the Python migration story gives any inference towards the outcome of an eventual C++ transition, the new language would be an even more massive success; it seems that Python 3.x is doing alright right?
- roenxi 6y agoThat is somewhere in the logical region of saying 'Stephen Hawking was really smart, maybe amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a good thing'. The transition to Python 3 was not pretty. Still isn't; Python 2 documentation features prominently when I'm trying to look up information. The to abandon backwards compatibility in C++ is to make a mockery even of the name of the language (see the "C" in there). If they want to create a new language they should call it something different. Willfully abandoning backwards compatibility and keeping the name is an abuse of one of the great brands in software.
- santamarias 6y agoI was just trying to get a response to how the Python transition mentioned was so (edit:) "catastrophic". I don't understand the need to bring fiction writers, fatal diseases or laden words like "mockery" or "abuse" to the debate.
- ComputerGuru 6y agoStephen Hawking was not a fiction writer. Stephen King does not have a horrible disease.
- santamarias 6y agosorry, my bad
- bsder 6y ago> Python 2 documentation features prominently when I'm trying to look up information. I consider this more a case of the ossification of search. Neither search engines nor specific sites like Stack Overflow deal with the fact that information can switch from right to wrong with age.
- tempay 6y agoYeah, I think Python 2 has been successfully killed at this point. There are a decent number of projects which still need to migrate (and I recently became responsible for a couple) but it’s been a long time since I heard anyone claim they can keep Python 2 forever. The maintenance burden of keeping Python 2 is rapidly increasing as libraires drop support.
- phire 6y agoYou could do so much better than the python 2 to 3 transition. If the python 3 interpreter could still run python 2 code. If you could mix and match python 2 and 3 code on a per-module, per-file or even per file basis, then the transition could have been so much smoother.
- BiteCode_dev 6y agoThe reasons the transitions worked were that: - the languages were not that different, so no need to learn the new version - python core devs gave 10 years to make the transition. Then extended it. - it was possible to write code running on python 2 and 3 - python is very expressive, hence the code base have way less numbers of lines than in C++ - python cared only about one implementation, Cpython. The rest of the world needed to follow. Some didn't, like Jython and stackless, and the community didn't blink. Despite all that, the transition was very painful.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago“Worked?” Nothing about the Python 2 to 3 transition “worked” and people are still aghast that’s Python 2 is being EOL’d.
- slovenlyrobot 6y agoI'm several years into the "upgrade" and find myself still swearing daily at the idiocy of the whole thing. Hundreds of scripts used maybe once a year, such as 'dups.py' I tried to run today, broken by a missing parenthesis, and a function moved around. Utterly pointless and reputationally ruinous. I don't do serious work in Python any more
- joshuamorton 6y agoThat has...nothing to do with python3 though, that's just your broken code being broken.
- jjnoakes 6y agoprint vs print() is what I think the parent comment was referring to.
- slovenlyrobot 6y agoI recognize it may be difficult to understand, but this is a thread about backwards compatibility. Of course if I had any faith in the contemporary Python community, I would still be treating Python as a serious programming language and not be suggesting this is a difficult concept for someone to grasp.
- pletnes 6y agoSince python3 has many more users than python2 this is not a relevant comparison. It was not smooth, but now it’s done and it worked. There have been many C++ forks which have failed to replace it, e.g D, Rust, ...
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoD and Rust are not forks of C++, they're entirely different languages.