Yeah, python 2->3 transition was painful. But, I would argue that was self inflicted. Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally.
I mean, I love python, but that sucked!
Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse.
In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).
> Guido and company chose not to develop a 2.8/2.9/etc series where people could move their code base over incrementally.
That is literally what 2.7 was, as well as reimplementing some features in later p3 (up to 3.4).
The core team definitely had the wrong transition model at the start, and it took some time for the community to convince them then decide on which items were the most important, but let’s not act like they did not get it in the end.
> In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).
The core team initially saw the transition as “run 2to3, fix what’s left, publish updates, P2 is gone”, but aside from 2to3 being quite limited such transition is quite hard for dependencies, as it means they leave all older dependents behind entirely (dependents which might be the primary user for e.g. company-sponsored projects), or they have to keep two different codebases in sync (which is hard), plus the limitations of pypi in terms of versions segregation.
What ended up happening instead was libraries would update to 2.7 then to cross-version codebases, this way their downstream could migrate at their leisure, a few years down the line people started dropping P2.
> Are there any languages with major breaking changes that have done the upgrade smoothly?
Some but usually statically typed languages e.g. elm’s upgrade tool worked pretty well as long as you didn’t have native modules and all your dependencies had been ported. I think the swift migrator ended up working pretty well after a while (Swift broke compatibility a lot “initially”) though I’ve less experience with that.
An alternative, again for statically typed languages more than dynamically typed ones, is to allow majorly different versions of the language to cohabit e.g. editions in Rust (Rust shares the stdlib between all editions but technically you could version the stdlib too).
Not workable for Python, not just because it doesn’t really have the tooling (it has some with the __future__ imports but nowhere near enough) but also because it changed runtime data model components specifically the entire string data model, which is not a small matter (and was by far the most difficult part of the transition, and why they piled on smaller breakages while at it really).
I mean, I love python, but that sucked!
Yes it would have been more work for the devs, but the amount of work it meant for the users were worse.
In fact they pretty much just threw away anything before python 3.6 anyway now. Many things introduced in the 3.x series before 3.6 just don't work anymore (asyncio syntax being the notable one).