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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

All future generations should remember the Python 2 to 3 transition as the one time in history that a programming language successfully made a breaking change so far into maturity and survived, and only just by one single fingertip holding on to avoid falling into the abyss below.

(I’m being hyperbolic, a little).

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It will be interesting to see how Scala 2->3 goes. The timing is good. After an initial boom, interest in Scala settled back into a smaller niche than expected, and since that happened entirely under Scala 2, it won't be blamed on the transition to 3. The smaller community will be easier to help through the process, and the tooling and compatibility are better thanks to Scala being a statically typed language. Having the example of Python to follow (or not, where appropriate) doesn't hurt, either.

That's exactly this

Courageous transition!

A language that doesn't evolve and is scared of change is a dead language

That's true for programming languages, but also for spoken languages too

I hope the D community gets it right when they design the version 3 of their language

A lot to learn from Python's successful transition

I really can't say if you're serious or joking. Python's transition can only be called 'successful' if the plan was to inflict as much pain as possible on maintainers of Python projects (and nowadays, Typescript via Deno doesn't really look all that bad for new projects where I would have used Python before).

If the 2-to-3 transition hadn't left so many scars, the idea to switch to a different language for cross-platform command line tools wouldn't even enter my mind. Python 2.x was just perfect for this use case, and Python3 didn't add anything of value for such scripts.

Many 3rd-parties are mostly responsible of how painful it was for some people

Maintainers don't like changing things, so that didn't help either

Not everything is perfect, but the transition allowed it to get a new birth, that's why i see it as a positive thing

At this point, D community should be happy if D2 still matters in about 10 years time.

Java, C# and C++ have improved in the domains where D might have had the upper hand back when Andrei Alexandrescu's book came out.

D3 would be worse than Tango vs Phobos on D1.

Tell that to perl, or php.

Tell that to python, or C#

What example is C# exactly? Never struck me as anything reaching wide adoption outside of the enterprise MS market, and you can certainly change anything if your customers already sunk the licensing cost. I certainly never and will never touch it, with or without incompatible language changes.

.net -> dotnet core

The entire history of programing languages is about 70 years.

And hundreds of commercially used programming languages during that period. It might be a short history, but it's littered with the corpses of languages that failed to change when they should have =)

Unfortunately I am re-living it on Java and .NET platforms, where Java 8 and .NET Framework play the role of Python 2.

Is it really different to .NET Framework vs .NET Core and what came after (.NET 5+).

Yes, because .NET was so old and mature that it's not like you suddenly received updates from all around that your computer couldn't run. By the time .NET 5 was popular enough everyone could have the runtime. And if not, your software were advanced enough and your devs competent enough in the old ways that you could enact change for years.

I suffer from that at work (I have 200 users on .NET and dozens of servers needing some python): we dont have the runtime for .NET 5 installed on windows yet, and we dont have python 3 on many older servers. There is one part where we suffer immensely, and another where we barely care: I let you guess which one.

Microsoft themselves are yet to fully move away from .NET Framework.

I feel like with python it was a lot harder since scripts could point to either, e.g.:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

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