[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.)

[Terry Reedy]

On 5/31/2015 10:15 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> 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.

There is another somewhat invisible but real aspect of migration that 
tends to get ignored: the Python embedded in applications.  LibreOffice 
4.0, for instance, upgraded from 2.6 to 3.3 (around Jan 14 I think). It 
is currently in lo4dir/program/python-core-3.3.1.  I presume unicode 
everywhere pluse the new-in-3.3 efficient, cross-platform unicode 
implementation had something to do with this.  lo4dir/program/wizards is 
a package with subpackages and over 100 .py files.  There are now 
perhaps 20 million LO4 users (and indirect 3.3 users) around the world 
(my guess from Wikipedia article). A few will use the PyUNO bridge for 
scripting.  Installations are from CDs, direct downloads, torrents, and 
linux distributions, but not from pypi.  In a few years, the number 
might grow to 100 million as more LO3 users upgrade and new users start 
with LO4.

[...]

> 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).

Perhaps we should investigate whether other apps with embedded but user 
accessible python has migrated and if not, ask why not (dependencies?) 
and whether planned.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy