[Python-Dev] Python 3 migration status update across some key subcommunities (was Re: 2.7 is here until 2020, please don't call it a waste.)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 31 May 2015 at 19:07, Ludovic Gasc <gmludo at gmail.com> wrote:
> About Python 3 migration, I think that one of our best control stick is
> newcomers, and by extension, Python trainers/teachers.
> If newcomers learn first Python 3, when they will start to work
> professionally, they should help to rationalize the Python 3 migration
> inside existing dev teams, especially because they don't have an interest
> conflict based on the fact that they haven't written plenty of code with
> Python 2.
> 2020 is around the corner, 5 years shouldn't be enough to change the
> community mind, I don't know.

The education community started switching a while back - if you watch
Carrie-Anne Philbin's PyCon UK 2014 keynote, one of her requests for
the broader Python community was for everyone else to just catch up
already in order to reduce student's confusion (she phrased it more
politely than that, though). Educators need to tweak examples and
exercises to account for a version switch, but that's substantially
easier than migrating hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines
of production code.

And yes, if you learn Python 3 first, subsequently encountering Python
2's quirks and cruft is likely to encourage folks that know both
versions of the language to start advocating for a version upgrade :)

After accounting for the "Wow, the existing Python 2 install base is
even larger than we realised" factour, the migration is actually in a
pretty good place overall these days. The "enterprise" crowd really
are likely to be the only ones that might need the full remaining 5
years of migration time (and they may potentially have even more time,
if they're relying on a commercial redistributor).

Web frameworks have allowed Python 3 development for a while now, and
with Django switching their tutorial to Python 3 by default, Django
downloads via pip show one of the highest proportions of Python 3
adoption on PyPI. www.python.org itself is now a production Python 3
Django web service, and the next generation of pypi.python.org will be
a Pyramid application that's also running on Python 3.

The dedicated async/await syntax in 3.5 represents a decent carrot to
encourage migration for anyone currently using yield (or yield from)
based coroutines, since the distinct syntax not only allows for easier
local reasoning about whether something is an iterator or a coroutine,
it also provides a much improved user experience for asynchronous
iterators and context managers (including finally handling the
"asynchronous database transaction as a context manager" case, which
previous versions of Python couldn't really do at all).

The matrix multiplication operator is similarly a major improvement
for the science and data analysis part of the Python community.

In terms of reducing *barriers* to adoption, after inviting them to
speak at the 2014 language summit, we spent a fair bit of time with
the Twisted and Mercurial folks over the past year or so working
through "What's still missing from Python 3 for your use cases?", as
Python 3.4 was still missing some features for binary data
manipulation where we'd been a bit too ruthless in pruning back the
binary side of things when deciding what counted as text-only
features, and what was applicable to binary data as well. So 3.5
brings back binary interpolation, adds a hex() method to bytes, and
adds binary data support directly to a couple of standard library
modules (tempfile, difflib).

If I understand the situation correctly, the work Guido et al have
been doing on PEP 484 and type hinting standardisation is also aimed
at reducing barriers to Python 3 adoption, by making it possible to
develop better migration tools that are more semantically aware than
the existing syntax focused tools. The type hinting actually acts as a
carrot as well, since it's a feature that mainly shows its value when
attempting to scale a *team* to larger sizes (as it lets you delegate
more of the code review process to an automated tool, letting the
human reviewers spend more time focusing on higher level semantic
concerns).

Finally, both Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora are well advanced in their
efforts to replace Python 2 with Python 3 in their respective default
images (but keeping Py2 available in their package repos). That work
is close to finished now (myself, Slavek Kabrda, Barry Warsaw, and
Matthias Klose had some good opportunities to discuss that at PyCon),
although there are still some significant rough edges to figure out
(such as coming up with a coherent cross-platform story for what we're
going to do with the Python symlink), as well as a few more key
projects to either migrate entirely, or at least finish porting to the
source compatible subset of Python 2 & 3 (e.g. Samba).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia