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by oivey
174 days ago
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I think we essentially agree. My comments about maintainers wasn’t referencing the Python language maintainers. The print change certainly shouldn’t have blocked anyone. More interesting is how long it took core libraries to transition. That was my primary blocker. My guess is that there were fairly substantial changes to the CPython API that slowed that transition. Other changes to strings could be actually dangerous if you were doing byte-level manipulations. Maybe tools could help catch those situations. Even if they did, it took some thought and not just find/replace to fix. The change was a net benefit, but it’s easy to see why people might be frustrated or delay transition. |
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Your definition of "core libraries" is likely a lot broader than mine. I'm old, and I remember back in the day when Perl developers started learning the hard way that CPAN isn't the Perl standard library.
JavaScript's culture has embraced pulling in libraries for every single little thing, which has resulted in stuff like the left pad debacle, but that very public failing is just the tip of the iceberg for what problems occur when you pull in a lot of bleeding edge libraries. The biggest problems, IMO, are with security. These problems are less common in Python's culture, but still fairly common.
I've come onto a number of projects to help them clean up codebases where development had become slow due to poor code quality, and the #1 problem I see is too many libraries. Libraries don't reduce complexity, they offload it onto the library maintainers, and if those library maintainers don't do a good job, it's worse than writing the code yourself. And it's not necessarily library maintainers' fault they don't do a good job: if they stop getting paid to maintain the library, or never were paid to maintain it in the first place, why should they do a good job of maintaining it?
The Python 2 to 3 transition wasn't harder for most core libraries than it was for any of the rest of us: if anything, it was easier for them because if they're a core library they don't have as many dependencies to wait on.
There are exceptions, I'm sure, but I'll tell you that Django, Pillow, Requests, BeautifulSoup, and pretty much every other library I use regularly, supported both Python 2 AND 3 before I even found out that Python 3 was going to have significant breaking changes. On the flip side, many libraries I had to upgrade had been straight up abandoned, and never transitioned from 2 to 3 (a disproportionate number of these were OAuth libraries, for some reason). I take some pride in the fact that most of the libraries that had problems with the upgrade were ones that had been imported when I wasn't at the company, or ones that I had fought against importing because I was worried about whether they would be maintained. It's shocking how many of these libraries were fixable not with an upgrade, but with removing the dependency writing a <100 lines of my own code including tests.
I'd hope the lesson we can take away from this isn't, "don't let Python make any breaking changes", but instead, "don't import libraries off Pypi just to avoid writing 25 lines of your own code".