The Python community consisted of tons of developers including very wealthy companies. At what point in the last few years would you even say they became “rich enough” to do the migration? Because people are STILL talking about trying to fork 2.7 into a 2.8.
I also disagree with your assertion that 3.x releases have significant breaking changes. Could you point to any specific major breaking changes between 3.x releases?
2 to 3 didn’t break syntax for most code either. It largely cleaned house on sensible API defaults.
I can not, but I can tell you that anything AI often requires finding a proper combination of python + cuXXX + some library. And while I understand cu-implications, for some reason python version is also in this formula.
I literally have four python versions installed and removed from PATH, because if I delete 3.9-3.11, they will be needed next day again and there’s no meaningful default.
That said, 3.12 doesn't even have python312.exe in its folder. If 3.13 follows, having both of them in PATH is useless.
Sure I'm not that knowledgeable in this topic (in python). But you're telling me they go to the lengths of supporting e.g. 3.9-3.11.2, but out of lazyness won't just compile it to 3.12?
I can only hypothesize that 3.9-3.xxx had the same ABI and they don't support multiple ABIs out of principle, but that sounds like a very strange idea.
Quite a bit of that could be fixed by automated tooling, but not all of it, and the testing burden was huge, which meant a lot of smaller packages did not convert very quickly and there were ripple effects.
Regarding breakage in 3.x, all I know is that I recall several times where I did a linux system update (rolling release), and that updated my Python to a newly released version which broke various things in my system. I'm pretty sure one of these was v3.10, but I forget which others caused me problems which I could only solve by pinning Python to an older release.
It's entirely possible though that no actual APIs were broken and that this was just accidentaly bugs in the release, or the packages were being naughty and relying on internals they shouldn't have relied on or something else.
Python isn’t fully ABI stable (though it’s improved greatly) so you can’t just intermix compiled dependencies between different versions of Python.
This is true for many packages in your distro as well.
- standard library modules removed
- zip error handling behaves differently
- changes to collections module
- new reserved keywords (async, await, etc.)
You can argue how big of a deal it is or isn't, but there were definitely breakages that violate semantic versioning
Almost every major noteworthy Python package uses the ABI, so instability there is going to constantly be felt ecosystem wide.
Python 3 made no sense from a cost/risk perspective for teams with a lot working and mostly finished Python 2 code.
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.3.html#porting-to-pytho...
> Hash randomization is enabled by default. Set the PYTHONHASHSEED environment variable to 0 to disable hash randomization. See also the object.__hash__() method.
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.4.html#porting-to-pytho...
> The deprecated urllib.request.Request getter and setter methods add_data, has_data, get_data, get_type, get_host, get_selector, set_proxy, get_origin_req_host, and is_unverifiable have been removed (use direct attribute access instead).
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.5.html#porting-to-pytho...
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.6.html#removed
> All optional arguments of the dump(), dumps(), load() and loads() functions and JSONEncoder and JSONDecoder class constructors in the json module are now keyword-only. (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-18726.)
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.7.html#api-and-feature-...
> Removed support of the exclude argument in tarfile.TarFile.add(). It was deprecated in Python 2.7 and 3.2. Use the filter argument instead.
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.8.html#api-and-feature-...
> The function time.clock() has been removed, after having been deprecated since Python 3.3: use time.perf_counter() or time.process_time() instead, depending on your requirements, to have well-defined behavior. (Contributed by Matthias Bussonnier in bpo-36895.)
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.9.html#removed
> array.array: tostring() and fromstring() methods have been removed. They were aliases to tobytes() and frombytes(), deprecated since Python 3.2. (Contributed by Victor Stinner in bpo-38916.)
> Methods getchildren() and getiterator() of classes ElementTree and Element in the ElementTree module have been removed. They were deprecated in Python 3.2. Use iter(x) or list(x) instead of x.getchildren() and x.iter() or list(x.iter()) instead of x.getiterator(). (Contributed by Serhiy Storchaka in bpo-36543.)
> The encoding parameter of json.loads() has been removed. As of Python 3.1, it was deprecated and ignored; using it has emitted a DeprecationWarning since Python 3.8. (Contributed by Inada Naoki in bpo-39377)
> The asyncio.Task.current_task() and asyncio.Task.all_tasks() have been removed. They were deprecated since Python 3.7 and you can use asyncio.current_task() and asyncio.all_tasks() instead. (Contributed by Rémi Lapeyre in bpo-40967)
> The unescape() method in the html.parser.HTMLParser class has been removed (it was deprecated since Python 3.4). html.unescape() should be used for converting character references to the corresponding unicode characters.
https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.10.html#removed
