this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
73 points (95.1% liked)

Python

6229 readers
85 users here now

Welcome to the Python community on the programming.dev Lemmy instance!

📅 Events

October 2023

November 2023

PastJuly 2023

August 2023

September 2023

🐍 Python project:
💓 Python Community:
✨ Python Ecosystem:
🌌 Fediverse
Communities
Projects
Feeds

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
erlingur@programming.dev
jnovinger@programming.dev
73
Python developers won’t let go of Python 2 (www.infoworld.com)
submitted 11 months ago by ruffsl@programming.dev to c/python@programming.dev
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] o11c@programming.dev -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Python 2 had one mostly-working str class, and a mostly-broken unicode class.

Python 3, for some reason, got rid of the one that mostly worked, leaving no replacement. The closest you can get is to spam surrogateescape everywhere, which is both incorrect and has significant performance cost - and that still leaves several APIs unavailable.

Simply removing str indexing would've fixed the common user mistake if that was really desirable. It's not like unicode indexing is meaningful either, and now large amounts of historical data can no longer be accessed from Python.

[–] JigglySackles@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for that context. Seems odd that they would remove the str instead of taking the time to fix it.

[–] o11c@programming.dev 1 points 11 months ago

It's because unicode was really broken, and a lot of the obvious breakage was when people mixed the two. So they did fix some of the obvious breakage, but they left a lot of the subtle breakage (in addition to breaking a lot of existing correct code, and introducing a completely nonsensical bytes class).