Reddit mentions of Porting to Python 3: An in-depth guide

>If it was self evidently true, the claim would not be, repeatedly, made by people.

Are you kidding? In America about half the population rejects evolution and there are still lots of climate change deniers. In both cases the evidence is voluminous. The amount of evidence is irrelevant when one is ignorant of what one is talking about.

>Unfortunately many of the improvements in python3 are not self evident.

What's a "self-evident" improvement?

>Once again it really just boils down to: new python users learn py3 and are
>irritated by py2 hanging around; many people already working with python
>consider the cost of porting to be insurmountably larger than the benefit gained
>from python3.

Then I have this to say: suck it up. It's a fact of life: you HAVE to port, just as XP users have to stop using it. Technical debt is a fact of life in software development and it's baffling to encounter people who don't understand that. Python 3 is the way forward, period (since none of the complainers have shown any interest in actually forking Python 2.7 or contributing code themselves). You can either be stuck at a dead end or move forward, and every line of code you continue to write in 2.x just makes the eventual transition harder.

On top of that, between 2to3, six, python-modernize and a lot of other libraries the cost of porting is not severe. In fact, again, there have been Python talks by people who ported codebases to 3 and they say that it wasn't that bad, but for some reason the reality can't change the perception. There are books available like Porting to Python 3: An in-depth guide. The co-author of Python Cookbook wrote a blog post about porting dateutil to Python3. It took him 4-5 hours and he'd never looked at dateutil code before! He went on to write:

>This is totally doable. Stop listening to the fear-inducing rantings of naysayers. Don’t let them hold you back. The pink ponies are
>in front of you, not behind you.
>...“I Can’t Port Because…”
>If you’re still skeptical, or you have questions, or you’re trying and having real problems, Dave and I would both love for you to
>come to our tutorial at PyCon. Or just come to PyCon so we can hack in the hallway on it. I’ve ported, or am in the process of
>porting, 3 modules to Python 3. Dave has single-handedly ported something like 3-5 modules to Python 3 in the past 6 weeks or
>so. He’s diabolical.

I couldn't find the video online, but the authors were so confident in Python 3 they planned on taking challenges direct from the audience and showing them how Python 3 can solve their problems ("Attendees should plan on bringing challenges for us to address - we will demonstrate the use of Python 3 to solve all manner of practical problems as suggested by the audience"). Note: Don't google "Cooking with Python 3" or you'll get lots of recipes for eating snake. :-)


>Its not that python3 isnt compelling as a platform; its (and completely validly) the
>cost to using it is not yet enough to make the swap for some people

There is no "cost" to using it other than some things not being backwards compatible. The irony is that many Python 3 features were backported to Python 2 at the insistence of Python 2 users, and now these people are complaining that Python 3 isn't worth switching to (?!?).

>Its not quite as simple as 'python3 is fine'

It is. The Python 3 community is doing just fine and Python hasn't gone the way of COBOL like some people were writing about in 2012. Most major libraries have ported or been replaced. People are demanding that the volunteer developers do things to please them but none of the complainers want to fork Python 2.7 and make a 2.8 themselves. This shows that there is no demand for a Python 2.8 and/or that it's not as simple as they claim. Python 3 could incorporate AI that writes your code for you and people would still complain "There's no compelling reason to switch!"