[Python-ideas] Smoothing transition to Python 3

[Neil Schemenauer]

On 2016-06-04, tritium-list at sdamon.com wrote:
> In fact most of the things you list here are the GOOD ideas
> that python 3 enforces that reduces bugs when avoided in python 2.

Sure, and I'm not proposing that standard Python 3.x change the
behavior.

> What would actually help the transition, in my world-view at least is 
> 
> * A bytes type like the string type in python 2 (*without implicit
> conversion!*) There are too many real world use cases that the bytes type
> makes painful, including anything dealing with networking.

The Python 3 bytes type should gain whatever features it needs to
make things not painful.  The %-based formating in 3.5 is a big one.
Is there something else you miss?

> * an alias to the string type named 'unicode' (this just makes polyglot a
> whole heck of a lot less stressful... yes I do this myself, it's annoying,
> if it was there by default, like bytes is in 2.7, it would make life a lot
> easier.  One just never just never references `str`)

Maybe too late now but there should have been 'unicode',
'basestring' as aliases for 'str'.

> * a "magic" mapping from old to new module names.  In my experience, this is
> actually a bigger pain than it looks.

I would like to add this to my "pragmatic" version.

> The general response was the theme of the entire python 3
> transition story:  "I don't see the value added."

Yes, and here we are.  Python 3 is not yet winning and I'm not sure
it will.  I believe Dropbox, Facebook and Google are all still using
Python 2.  If porting code was so easy, why are they not moved over?
I see VMWare released some new IoT SDK:

    https://github.com/vmware/liota

This is new code, written this year.  It is not compatible with
Python 3 as far as I see.  I can't understand why people don't see
we have a problem.

  Neil