[eigenspace]

Python's community was significantly smaller and less flushed with cash during the 2 to 3 transition. Since then there has been numerous 3.x releases that were breaking and people seem to have been sucking it up and dealing with it quietly so far.

The main thing is that unlike the 2 to 3 transition, they're not breaking syntax (for the most part?), which everyone experiences and has an opinion on, they're breaking rather deep down things that for the most part only the big packages rely on so most users don't experience it much at all.

[dagmx]

I disagree with this entire comment.

The Python community consisted of tons of developers including very wealthy companies. At what point in the last few years would you even say they became “rich enough” to do the migration? Because people are STILL talking about trying to fork 2.7 into a 2.8.

I also disagree with your assertion that 3.x releases have significant breaking changes. Could you point to any specific major breaking changes between 3.x releases?

2 to 3 didn’t break syntax for most code either. It largely cleaned house on sensible API defaults.

[wruza]

Could you point to any specific major breaking changes between 3.x releases?

I can not, but I can tell you that anything AI often requires finding a proper combination of python + cuXXX + some library. And while I understand cu-implications, for some reason python version is also in this formula.

I literally have four python versions installed and removed from PATH, because if I delete 3.9-3.11, they will be needed next day again and there’s no meaningful default.

[holdenweb]

They'll all co-exist. Add them all to your PATH, make one the default python3, and request specific versions when they are required.

[wruza]

I don't need the default, because which python to choose depends on project's dependencies which may work only for specific versions. And then you build a venv and it lives there. It's not some safety measure, it's a natural choice. I don't need bare `python` command outside of venv.

That said, 3.12 doesn't even have python312.exe in its folder. If 3.13 follows, having both of them in PATH is useless.

[dagmx]

Those are ABI changes and not changes to the language.

[wruza]

If these were just ABI changes, packagers would simply re-package under a new ABI. Instead they specify ranges of versions in which "it works". The upper end often doesn't include the last python version and may be specified as "up to 3.x.y" even.

Sure I'm not that knowledgeable in this topic (in python). But you're telling me they go to the lengths of supporting e.g. 3.9-3.11.2, but out of lazyness won't just compile it to 3.12?

I can only hypothesize that 3.9-3.xxx had the same ABI and they don't support multiple ABIs out of principle, but that sounds like a very strange idea.

[adamc]

2 to 3 broke lots of code. Print became a function. Imports moved around. And there were subtle changes in the semantics of some things. Famously, strings changed, and that definitely affected a lot of packages.

Quite a bit of that could be fixed by automated tooling, but not all of it, and the testing burden was huge, which meant a lot of smaller packages did not convert very quickly and there were ripple effects.

[dagmx]

Yes 2 to 3 changed things. We’re discussing what changed in between different versions of 3.

[eigenspace]

Fair enough. You may be totally right here, as I mentioned I don't use Python much at all since like 2017 and haven't paid it much attention in a while. I retract my comment.

Regarding breakage in 3.x, all I know is that I recall several times where I did a linux system update (rolling release), and that updated my Python to a newly released version which broke various things in my system. I'm pretty sure one of these was v3.10, but I forget which others caused me problems which I could only solve by pinning Python to an older release.

It's entirely possible though that no actual APIs were broken and that this was just accidentaly bugs in the release, or the packages were being naughty and relying on internals they shouldn't have relied on or something else.

[dagmx]

To your last point: it’s neither the language nor the packages but rather it’s the ABI.

Python isn’t fully ABI stable (though it’s improved greatly) so you can’t just intermix compiled dependencies between different versions of Python.

This is true for many packages in your distro as well.

[dbsmith83]

There have been many breaking changes throughout python 3.x releases:

- standard library modules removed

- zip error handling behaves differently

- changes to collections module

- new reserved keywords (async, await, etc.)

You can argue how big of a deal it is or isn't, but there were definitely breakages that violate semantic versioning

[maleldil]

Python doesn't follow SemVer, that's why.

https://peps.python.org/pep-2026/

[dbsmith83]

Clearly, which is what I was showing. A poor design decision imo

[eigenspace]

They removed entire standard library modules? Wut.

[heisenzombie]

Yes, e.g. https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/

[eigenspace]

Ah I see. Yeah, I guess I just think that for a language that's so dependent on FFI, instability in the ABI is defacto instability in the language as far as I'm concerned. But I understand that not everyone feels the same.

Almost every major noteworthy Python package uses the ABI, so instability there is going to constantly be felt ecosystem wide.

[lanstin]

My company would pay for 2.8. And a lot of internal teams that used Python 2 now use go for that. Not ML but devops/infra orchestration.

Python 3 made no sense from a cost/risk perspective for teams with a lot working and mostly finished Python 2 code.

[hawski]

Most of those are some old long deprecated things and in general those are all straight up improvements. Python is not my main thing so I'm not really good to answer this, but I listed a few that I am sure triggered errors in some code bases (I'm not saying they are all major). Python's philosophy makes most of those pretty easy to handle, for example instead of foo now you have to be explicit and choose either foo_bar or foo_baz. For example in C there still is a completely bonkers function 'gets' which is deprecated for a long time and it will be there probably for a long time as well. C standard library, Windows C API and Linux C API to large extent are add only, because things should stay bug-to-bug compatible. Python is not like that. This has its perks, but it may cause your old Python code to just not run. It may be easy to modify, but easy is significantly harder than nothing at all.

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.3.html#porting-to-pytho...

> Hash randomization is enabled by default. Set the PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to 0 to disable hash randomization. See also the object.__hash__() method.

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.4.html#porting-to-pytho...

> The deprecated urllib.request.Request getter and setter methods add_data, has_data, get_data, get_type, get_host, get_selector, set_proxy, get_origin_req_host, and is_unverifiable have been removed (use direct attribute access instead).

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.5.html#porting-to-pytho...

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.6.html#removed

> All optional arguments of the dump(), dumps(), load() and loads() functions and JSONEncoder and JSONDecoder class constructors in the json module are now keyword-only. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-18726.)

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html#api-and-feature-...

> Removed support of the exclude argument in tarfile.TarFile.add(). It was deprecated in Python 2.7 and 3.2. Use the filter argument instead.

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.8.html#api-and-feature-...

> The function time.clock() has been removed, after having been deprecated since Python 3.3: use time.perf_counter() or time.process_time() instead, depending on your requirements, to have well-defined behavior. (Contributed by Matthias Bussonnier in bpo-36895.)

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.9.html#removed

> array.array: tostring() and fromstring() methods have been removed. They were aliases to tobytes() and frombytes(), deprecated since Python 3.2. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-38916.)

> Methods getchildren() and getiterator() of classes ElementTree and Element in the ElementTree module have been removed. They were deprecated in Python 3.2. Use iter(x) or list(x) instead of x.getchildren() and x.iter() or list(x.iter()) instead of x.getiterator(). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-36543.)

> The encoding parameter of json.loads() has been removed. As of Python 3.1, it was deprecated and ignored; using it has emitted a DeprecationWarning since Python 3.8. (Contributed by Inada Naoki in bpo-39377)

> The asyncio.Task.current_task() and asyncio.Task.all_tasks() have been removed. They were deprecated since Python 3.7 and you can use asyncio.current_task() and asyncio.all_tasks() instead. (Contributed by Rémi Lapeyre in bpo-40967)

> The unescape() method in the html.parser.HTMLParser class has been removed (it was deprecated since Python 3.4). html.unescape() should be used for converting character references to the corresponding unicode characters.

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.10.html#removed

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.11.html#removed

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.12.html#removed

[dagmx]

Thanks. That’s a good list, though I think the majority of the changes were from deprecations early in the 3.x days and are API changes, whereas the OP was talking about syntax changes for the most part.

[eigenspace]

No I wasn't?

[dagmx]

Maybe i misunderstood your argument here where you scope it tightly to syntax changes being an issue but internal changes being fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42051745

[eigenspace]

What I meant by that is that because the changes mostly aren't syntax changes, they won't upset most users who are just using big packages that are actively maintained and keeping ahead of the breakage.

But I still find the high level of instability in Python land rather disturbing, and I would be unhappy if the languages I used constantly did these sorts of breaking changes

I'm even more extreme in that I also think the ABI instability is bad. Even though Python gives no guarantee of its stability, it's used by so many people it seems like a bad thing to constantly break and it probably should be stabilized.