alt Hacker NewsOh man, Python 2 > 3 was such a massive shift. Took almost half a decade if not more and yet it mainly changing superficial syntax stuff. They should have allowed ABIs to break and get these internal things done. Probably came up with a new, tighter API for integrating with other lower level languages so going forward Python internals can be changed more freely without breaking everything.
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I cannot believe people are still acting like Python 2->3 was a huge fuck-up and an enormous missed opportunity. When in reality Python is by most measures the most popular language and became so AFTER that switch.
Since the switch we have seen enormous companies being built from scratch. There is no reason for anyone to be complaining about it being too hard to upgrade in 2026
The biggest (and worst planned) change was module names. Your imports didn't work, forcing hacks like
if sys.version_info.major == 2:
import old
else:
import new
yes. it was not a massive shift. it was barely worth the effort.
The text encoding stuff wasn't a small change considering what it could break, at least. And remember we're sometimes talking about software that would cost a lot of money to migrate or upgrade. I still maintain some 2.x python code-bases that will be very expensive to migrate and the customer is not willing to invest that money.
Although your general sentiment is something I agree with(if it's going to be painful do it and get it over with), I don't believe anybody knew or could've guessed what the reaction of the ecosystem would be.
Your last point about being able to change internals more freely is also great in theory but very difficult(if not impossible) to achieve in practice.
I don't know. Having maintained some small projects that were free and open source, I saw the hostility and entitlement that can come from that position. And those projects were a spec of dust next to something like Python. So I think the core team is doing the best they can. It was always going to be damned if you do, damned if you don't.