Skip to main content

Why I don't like Python 3

Why I don't like Python 3


Python 3 sucks.  I hate that they've made changes so that aren't backwards-compatible.  You can't run many Python 2 scripts using the Python 3 interpreter.  It's almost like they've gone out of their way to piss off developers.

Here are some specific reasons why I hate Python 3:


  1. My biggest gripe: print is a function rather than a statement now.  I'm not saying it's not a good idea for print to be a function but why fuck with existing scripts?  Just keep the print statement as-is and create a new function with a distinct name.
  2. Data read from files comes back as bytes and you have to encode them.  More on this later but I think this is nonsense.
  3. You can't write a simple string to a file opened for binary.  Yes, I know about string.encode() but my point is I don't like having to use it.
  4. You can't turn off buffering when you open a text file for writing: open('foo', 'w', 0) throws can't have unbuffered text I/O!  Bullshit!  Sure, you can use 'wb' but why should we have to do that?
  5. A style like 0o100 is now required for octal (which I was never a big fan of) and 0100 is an error! What the hell!!

Comments

  1. John (aka Bruno)July 24, 2023 at 10:52 AM

    In this brave new world of Python 3, I've gotten used to it and have put Python 2 in the past. I don't mind the print problem so much anymore but binary/text is often still challenging.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dynamic Python script loading

I have a bunch of toys and tools in a Git repository - I affectionately call this my toys repo . Most are just scripts that I use from a Unix (Cygwin or Git bash on Windoze) command line but there are some Python classes that I sometimes use in another script. Today at work, I was coming up with a new Python script that made use of a couple of my public classes. The script is good enough to share with my colleagues but I'm faced with the problem of my public classes: I imagine that most of my colleagues haven't even heard of my public classes and I don't expect them to download the entire repo just to get a couple of classes If I'm going to distribute the classes as separate files I introduce new problems: It could be confusing to have the files tag along. What is the user supposed to do with them? The answer is nothing - they should leave them alone and make sure they are in the same directory as the main script in case they decide to move th...
1 comment
Read more

Git-based version information from Python script

I had this idea of generating version information for a Python script that uses ArgParse . The code is a little more than I was expecting but I think it works well. Here is the code: Usage Here is an example of its usage if the script is part of a git repository: $ ./version-example --version b92798, master, 2019-01-18 10:35:02, ['origin:https://github.com/pfuntner/gists.git'] $ It contains: The SHA1 of last git commit that changed the script The current branch of the repository The date of the commit - I think the timezone element is present in this but I didn't want to deal with timezones so I'm ignoring it A list of the remote repositories This is printed on two lines but that's something that ArgParse is doing, not me. Here is an example of its usage if the script is not part of a git repository - we don't have much information to work from but we can at least get the timestamp of the script: $ ~/tmp/version-example --version 2019-01-...
Post a Comment
Read more