Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@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. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
