Not downplaying how important our esteemed BDFL Guido is to Python, but I'll be flat out honest, aiming their sights on Python 2 just further entrenches its eventual place as the COBOL of 2050.
Python 2 is DEAD to me. It should be dead to you. It's Dead with a capital D. Node.js wound up with all this fork nonsense in HALF the time Python 2.7 has been stagnating the Python ecosystem.
Python 2 only code is nuclear waste grade technical debt.
I haven't written a line of Python 2 in 6 months after 2 years of slow decline.
I now use Python 2 vs 3 as an interview question.
I run my tests on 3.4.x, 3.5-dev, and versions of HEAD that pass the Python test suite.
Why does Guido working on Pyston do anything but hurt the future of Python by legitimising the position that it's ok as a community of Python programmers, to keep accruing this technical debt ?
> Python 2 is DEAD to me. It should be dead to you
You mean the kind of DEAD that has thousands of tested libraries supporting it and that runs and makes money in the bank. I like that kind of DEAD. Sign me up.
> Python 2 only code is nuclear waste grade technical debt.
It is nuclear fusion kind of code for me that just keeps making me money.
> I now use Python 2 vs 3 as an interview question.
What could you meangingfully interview about it? "Show me how to read this unicode file"?
> I run my tests on 3.4.x, 3.5-dev, and versions of HEAD that pass the Python test suite.
I run my tests on my code base and make sure they pass and have decent coverage.
> Why does Guido working on Pyston do anything but hurt the future of Python by legitimising the position that it's ok as a community of Python programmers, to keep accruing this technical debt ?
What technical debt. My code is clean and nice looking. There is no technical debt.
But pray tell what are these great features you are using in Python 3 that Python 2 doesn't have and that just call for all this great excitement?
I like me some fancy tuple unpacking and binary literals but not enough to go around yelling Python 2 is DEAD at anyone or to destabilize nice working code for it.
I recently visited a website which back end could not parse non-ascii character for credit card information. Here I am, willing to spend perfectly good money, and the stone age website only want money from people whose name is made from a-z.
Treating text and ascii as the same thing is bad. Its bad for technological reasons, its bad for economical reasons, and its just plain bad. If you think it "runs", it simply because all those customer who get "invalid character" error has gone over to a competitor and didn't bother to tell you.
> If you think it "runs", it simply because all those customer who get "invalid character" error has gone over to a competitor and didn't bother to tell you.
Silly, that's not how sales of $500K-$1M products work.
There aren't that many dependencies without py3 support anymore. Of course, if your project uses any then being stuck on py2 is a given.
I still don't think projects should port to python 3 unless they need to be moved forward or continually developed. Greenfield projects should most definitely start on py3 though.
I can't source the comment with a quick googling so take the recollection at face value, but I recall one of either the Pyston team members or Guido himself in an interview saying that he hadn't been involved so far.
As of release 0.2 he was referring to it as being "built by some of my colleagues"[1]. Looking at the list of contributors for the Pyston repo on github[2], I don't see gvanrossum among them.
If he is, that would certainly make the effort carry a lot more weight.