[mymac]

If only Python would be able to really solve their dependency and backwards compatibility issues, those are really holding the adoption back. Though there is a good chance that even if they fixed those that people burned in the past will never go back into it.

[boxed]

> [python] backwards compatibility issues

What issues? A lot of problems with Python is due to keeping compatibility with Python 2.0. Implicit string concat bites me fairly often for example, and it has never been useful.

[mymac]

2->3 has been a complete disaster, anything older than a few weeks tends to randomly break with some kind of dependency issue, sometimes requiring multiple installations of python on the same machine which will bite each other in hard to predict ways. Python is a wonderful idea but I've yet to be able to write something in python and call it 'finished' because it never ever continues to work in the longer term. Highly frustrating and in my opinion unnecessary.

[boxed]

> 2->3 has been a complete disaster

It WAS a long slog yes. But now it's pretty much done. And there really was no way to fix the unicode issue without a big painful transition.

> anything older than a few weeks tends to randomly break with some kind of dependency issue

I absolutely do not have this issue. Maybe you're using libraries very different from what I do? But I do think I have pretty wide interests/projects...

> sometimes requiring multiple installations of python on the same machine which will bite each other in hard to predict ways

I don't know what you're talking about here. Do you have an example?

> I've yet to be able to write something in python and call it 'finished' because it never ever continues to work in the longer term.

I don't have this experience.

[paulddraper]

What dependency and backwards compatibility issues does Python have?

That other languages don't?

[mymac]

Python software simply rots while you're not watching it. Either you make it a full time occupation, every time some library gets an 'upgrade' (with a ton of breaking changes) you get to rewrite your code, sometimes in non-obvious and intrusive ways. And every time the language changes in some breaking way you get to spend (lots of) time on debugging hard to track down problems because the codebases they occur in are large enough to mask the problems that would have come out if the same situation had occurred during development.

And that's before we get into the various ways in which python versions and library versions can interfere with each other. You couldn't have made a much bigger mess if you tried. And I actually like the core language. But so many projects I wrote in python just stopped working. I remember having a pretty critical chunk of pygame code written for a CAD system that just stopped working after an upgrade and there was no way it was ever going to run again without rewriting it. That's the sort of thing that really puts me of an I remember it long after. Machine learning code is still so much in flux that it doesn't matter. But hardware abstraction layers such as pygame should be long lived and stable between versions. And that really is just one example.

Anyway, I think asking 'That other languages don't' doesn't really matter. But Haskell (see TFA) is one language that always tried hard not to be successful so breaking changes would be permitted (which is fair). Python tries both to be popular and to allow for major stuff to be broken every now and then and that is very rough on those that have large codebases in production.

By contrast, COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, ERLANG, C and C++ code from ages ago still compiles, maybe you'll have to set a flag or two but they're pretty careful about stuff like that.

[aidos]

Are you pinning your dependency versions? If so, things should all still work later.

If you upgrade libs then sometimes you need to do some work. I’ve found python libs to be pretty stable though so it’s never too bad.

[dboreham]

> Either you make it a full time occupation

LOL Javascript enters the room.