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0 pointsNullabillity6y ago0 comments

If you want other people to make a change then it's on you to make a convincing argument for why the new thing is an improvement, not just go on tirades about how people should get with the times.

Personally, I lost faith in the Python core team because of the Py3 migration. Yes, 3.x now has a bunch of nice features that 2.x did, but almost none of them actually depend on the 3.0's breakage (as proven by Tauthon).

If you want people to follow you through a break-the-world migration then you need to motivate why it is needed and why it couldn't be done incrementally, not try tempt them with a bunch of unrelated carrots that are bundled together with the breaking change.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

madhadron6y ago· 1 in thread

> If you want people to follow you through a break-the-world migration then you need to motivate why it is needed and why it couldn't be done incrementally

They did. I remember looking through this, and I remain convinced that the core developers were correct and there was no way to fix Unicode handling incrementally.

NullabillityOP6y ago

Add the u-sigil for unicode (as they did), add the b-sigil for bytestrings (as they eventually did), and then go through a regular deprecation cycle for sigil-less strings (rather than releasing a 3.0 where the u-sigils were removed completely). Maybe at some point re-add sigil-less strings as an alias for u-strings, but I'd rather have old stuff break with a clear message than have a bunch of weird side bugs.

Do the same for the type names.

diminoten6y ago

I've done that; this isn't the first time I've talked about this problem. HN is not a safe space, there is no room to convince anyone of anything on here, so tirades are all that's left.

We're well past your argument. It's been 11 years, it is no longer reasonable to hold your particular grudge. Get on board with the modern Python or get the hell out of the conversation.

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