NAnas·Nov 23, 2016
> what's happening to Python?
Great things, IMHO. Now that the painful changes of 2 to 3 are done (or nearly so), recent releases have focused on incremental and steady progress. Take a look at the "What's New" documents:
https://docs.python.org/3.6/whatsnew/3.6.html
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.5.html
There is a lot of great stuff there without ripping up the world and breaking all your programs. For example, the new compact dict implementation in 3.6 is a great improvement. All Python programs can potentially benefit from the memory use reduction. Bug fixes and improvements to library code are great.
The transition from 2.x to 3.x was not handled well. The core Python team should have focused much more on making transitioning code easier. Allowing code that can easily run in both 2.x and 3.x (with suitable shims like 'si
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x') should have been a focus early on. Disallowing 'u' prefix on strings in 3.x is an example of a serious mistake. The argument of keeping 3.x pure was wrong. It is much more important to make transition easier rather than making 3.x extremely pure. That's something that C++ has got right, although maybe they went too far the other way.
My small contribution to transitioning 2.x to 3.x is "ppython". See my github repo:
https://github.com/nascheme/ppython
Now that I've been programming in Python 3 for a few months, I find it pleasant. Writing programs that handle Unicode text correctly is easier. For small programs, it is easy to make them run under either Python 2 or 3.