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by jimbob45 1752 days ago
If the general computing community can agree on anything over the last 20 years, it’s that Python 2->3 was a disaster. Even though Python 3 made several highly necessary (and irreversibly transformative) changes to Python 2, no one liked it because it fundamentally changed the language to something unfamiliar.

I’m guessing the SQL and C++ committees looked at that transition and decided that such transformative changes really need to be done in new languages (like the Perl -> Raku change) rather than in a new version which risks alienating your existing base.
3 comments
DaiPlusPlus 1752 days ago
Oh of course - I have no doubt the ISO SQL committee is so conservative (no... they're regressive) is because of the sheer collective industry investment in not-only SQL tooling and SQL-compatible databases, but just energy-spent in teaching non-CS/SE/programmer types in businesses how to express their data-queries in SQL. It's very, very difficult to get the kind of industry cohesiveness around any technical standard, so the fact that SQL is so widely supported is a miracle (though it probably has something to do with US federal government requirements for information systems to support it, just like how POSIX is a thing because of the fed pushing for it).

To be clear: I am not advocating for a brand new query-language syntax or any kind of Python3-style overhaul, but I'd like to see SQL start to take small steps towards integrating the lessons learned from the past 60+ years of language design rather than doing the complete opposite.

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btilly 1752 days ago
The Python 2 to Python 3 migration was such a disaster that Python 3 is now used by both more programmers, and a higher proportion of programmers, than Python 2 ever managed.

This is not to minimize the pain of switching. But it does not seem to ahve limited the success of the language.

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darksaints 1752 days ago
Python 2->3 was a disaster, but I'd refrain from extrapolation because a lot of that difficulty was very specific to dynamic typing or python itself. There are tons of languages that have gone through far more transformative changes in the core semantics of the language, and have gone a lot smoother.
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