[viraptor]

For all the buzz about python3 fiasco, we're pretty much migrated now and py2 gets dropped from supported versions and system repositories. Perl devs would be in a better situation with a "fiasco" like that. Ruby went through its own big breaking changes at least 2 times before as well. So... if people have good reasons to stay, a big change won't drive them away.

[badsectoracula]

> For all the buzz about python3 fiasco, we're pretty much migrated now and py2

Python 3.0 was released in 2008, the fact that 14 years later 2.7 is still widely available (and often the default python, e.g. in my openSUSE Tumbleweed system here) means that the "buzz" was more than warranted.

Also of course things would migrate, it isn't like there was any choice on that matter (and projects like Tauthon that tried to provide a choice had several "Pythonistas" attacking it).

[viraptor]

> it isn't like there was any choice on that matter

There was another choice. This is what I mean: however bad you think py2->py3 was, people are using py3 now unless they've got really good reasons not to and are prepared to suffer. When it came to perl5/6, it turns out over time most people choose "neither".

SUSE didn't update the link like others did so it's not really that py2 is the default, but python2 was always named python. It's going away anyway: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP3/in...

[codeflo]

The “neither” choice happened with Python 2/3 as well. The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend. Long before that, before the Python 3 transition, there was a significant amount of buzz around everything from web frameworks to desktop GUI applications. The way I remember it, almost all of that attention was killed during the transition, when people tried Python and found a significantly lacking and confusing ecosystem.

[MadWombat]

"The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend"

This new trend is about a decade old by now. Pandas was released in 2011, numpy in 1995. Google released Tensorflow to the public in 2015.

[baq]

it was a trend made possible by numpy and scipy being built for a decade before the phrase 'deep learning' was coined. it had just the right mix to blow up: easy to read, easy to write, batteries included.

it wasn't inevitable, but it was damn likely.

[rprospero]

> there was a significant amount of buzz around ... desktop GUI applications

As someone who is still supporting multiple desktop GUI applications in python, what did they pick instead? I'd love move off Python, but nothing else seemed to have the proper maturity.

[alisonatwork]

Seems like today's standard pick is Electron.

[badsectoracula]

> There was another choice.

Only if you count "not making a choice" (ie. staying with Python 2) as a choice. But this isn't really practical since everything else is pushed towards Python 3.

[doomvox]

> Perl devs would be in a better situation with a "fiasco" like that.

Well, the hang-up in the roll out of "Perl 6" (now, Raku) gave people ammunition to shout about how "Perl is dead", but the central trouble was a lot of people wanted to spread that word. Myself, I think the success of a weirdo outsider language was making some insiders very upset, and they were fighting back any way they could.

Supporting older, variant behavior isn't really causing problems for the devs, from what I hear, when it does they go after it with the deprecation cycle.

[jhbadger]

Yes, but in some domains (for example bioinformatics) py2 is still a requirement for many packages. It really hasn't gone away. Ruby was far more elegant in its upgrades and nearly everyone upgraded their packages because the needed changes were far more minor. I have code from ruby 1.8.7 that still works with ruby 3.x.