On Mon, May 8, 2017 at 2:34 AM, Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfr...@ix.netcom.com> wrote: > I can partly agree with one aspect... In comparison to my old life > with > versions of FORTRAN, wherein standards were roughly 10 years apart, each > standard tended to accept all of a previous standard, while declaring > things which would likely not be preserved in the next standard. That meant > one essentially had 10 years to port, say FORTRAN-IV/-66 fully into > FORTRAN-77 -- and that port would still be viable in Fortran-90 (giving one > ~10 years to remove port fully into F90). > > Python 2 to Python 3 broke too many things! Things that, in the > Fortran > example, would have worked but with a warning (in documentation, and only > in code if a compiler option for strictness were used), with the hard break > being between Python 2 and Python "4".
If you think Py2 -> Py3 is a big compatibility break, just have a look over at the JavaScript world. Python has been around for roughly 25 years, and in that time has reached its third major version; Node.js has been around for seven years, and is in its seventh. Similarly, the popular framework React has been around for four years, and is in its fourth major version; and where I teach JS programming, we had to quickly update our installation instructions saying "install this particular version", because version 4 was not compatible with what we were doing. It's not that hard to write code that's compatible with both Py2 and Py3 (say, with 2.7 and 3.5+). Most of it involves doing things the Py3 way though, so if you've become accustomed to working the Py2 way (pretending that bytes and characters are the same thing, for instance), you WILL need to change your thinking a bit. But Python 3.x has been around for ten years now, so that's about on par with your Fortran time scale; the incompatibilities do exist, but they aren't nearly as big as you might think. Python 4.0 will not need to make as much of a compatibility break even than 3.0 did, and that's already far less breakage than other ecosystems see. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
