Hacker News Reader

JS doesn't really have the tradition of external modules that Python has, for a long time it only really existed inside the browser.

Which is why I'm shocked that Python's big "we're breaking backwards compatibility" release (Python 3) was mostly just for Unicode strings. It seems like the C API and the various __builtins__ introspection API thingies should've been the real focus on breaking backwards compatibility so that Python would have a better future for improvements like this.

On the other hand, rewriting the C modules and adapting them to a different C API is very straightforward after you've done 1 or 2 of such modules. Perhaps it's even something that could be done by training an LLM like Copilot.

That's breakage you'd have to tread carefully on; and given the 2to3 experience, there would have to be immediate reward to entice people to undertake the conversion. No one's interested in even minor code breakage for minor short-term gain.