[wormlord]

> On the other hand, a lot of these changes to try and speed up the base language are going to be highly disruptive. E.g. disabling the GIL will break tonnes of code, lots of compilation projects involve changes to the ABI, etc.

Kind of related, the other day I was cursing like a sailor because I was having issues with some code I wrote that uses StrEnum not working with older versions of Python, and wondering why I did that, and trying to find the combination of packages that would work for the version of Python I needed-- wondering why there was so much goddamn churn in this stupid [expletive] scripting language.

But then I took a step back and realized that, actually, I should be glad about the churn because it means that there is a community of developers who care enough about the language to add new features and maintain this language so that I can just pipe PyQt and Numpy into each other and get paid.

I don't have any argument, just trying to give an optimistic perspective.

[d0mine]

At least bugfix versions could have kept Enum behavior the same. Postponing breaking changes until the next minor version. Some Enum features work differently (incompatible) in Python 3.11.x versions.

[wormlord]

> Some Enum features work differently (incompatible) in Python 3.11.x versions.

I wasn't aware of that, that's actually insane. It's odd to me that it took so long to get f-strings and Enums right in Python, I assumed those would be pretty easy language features to implement.

[roelschroeven]

> Some Enum features work differently (incompatible) in Python 3.11.x versions.

I know that Python 3.11 added some things, like StrEnum; those obviously won't work on older Python versions. But I'm not aware of things that work in a certain Python 3 version but don't work in newer ones. You're even talking about incompatibilities between different 3.11.x versions? Can you give some more detail on that?

[d0mine]

Yes, the issue is the change in behavior in a bugfix version. I don't remember the exact details.

[lmm]

Meh. Anyone can improve a language if they don't care about keeping backward compatibility, just like new programming languages and new codebases always look gloriously clean. The part that requires actual discipline and expertise is improving it while keeping the breakages under control.