Python Insider: Python 3.13.0 release candidate 1 released
Python Insider: Python 3.13.0 release candidate 1 released
Wow the changes to the REPL, GIL, and JIT are pretty sweet. Can't wait to try it out.
OMG they finally noticed how bad the REPL is. It's it going to let you paste indented code now?
Ipython.
I just spent days and days fixing years of old code that had incorrect backslash escapes in string literals because they were upgraded from silent deprecationwarnings to very much not silent syntaxwarnings in 3.12 and I couldn't find a way to shut them up.
Yes I know incorrect string literals are bad and they should be fixed, but this was legacy, well tested code and we were fine with the silent errors. But no: Python forced me to halt what I was doing and fix shit that didn't need fixing for days, then re-release new versions of all our packages, then warn our customers, write an entry in the company's website's support page, blah blah blah... Stupid things that, ya know, take a truckload of time.
And I also had to rewrite our old installers that used to install Python modules system-wide because, again, 3.12 pip now refuses to install outside of a venv unless you use --break-system-packages, and even if you do, it bitches and moans. I didn't want to fix our old installers either, but there ya go, same thing: no way to make it revert to the old way and let old code grow old peacefully.
And I had to rewrite our Unix modules that use crypt because inexplicably, for no rational reason, it's being dropped. WHY??? Yes it's insecure, but if you need it for backward compatibility reasons, why remove it? Particularly since it's still there: all you have to do is replace it with passlib.sha512. It's no biggie, but again, when you have mountains of old code to go through, it takes time to fix it, retest it and re-release it. What's the point in making things extra-difficult gratuitously?
And before you say "All you had to do was stick to 3.11 or below", try installing 3.11 and below for all users in Win11: you can't. Our users getting new Windows machine essentially have to use Python 3.12, meaning I have to fix all our old code so stuff doesn't break or look like shit.
Sigh...
I love this language. I really do. But the Python people essentially give zero shit about backward-compatibility and every 6 months to 2 years, some small things break that become a massive pain in the rear-end to fix.
And as a result, guess what: as long as whatever version of Python I'm currently using works, I am NOT upgrading it, because I don't like to have to work overtime for nothing. And that's not great because Python users should want to get the latest and greatest instead of fearing what new things will get broken.
I agree, too little regard for backwards compatibility. They also removed distutils which meant I had to fix a load of code that used it. It was bad code that shouldn't have used it even when written, but still... seems like they didn't learn their lesson from Python 2.
It's not like it would be difficult to avoid these issues either. Everyone else just makes you declare your "target version" and then the runtime keeps things compatible with that version - Android via SDK target version, Rust with its editions, hell even CMake got this right. CMake!!
I get your points!
But just out of curiosity, did you try using miniconda to install older python versions? That works wonders for me, also on windows 11.
The problem is, our code has to run on a customer install regardless of the install. Typically they downloaded Python and installed it themselves on their machine, and more often than not, they have stuff running on their machines and modules installed for their own stuff, and I can't go about telling them to install some other version and/or force them to use a certain tool to do so: it's gonna break their own config and it's going to piss them off.
Our code has to run clean without fuss on Linux and Windows, regardless of what's installed and how. All we require is any Python version between 3.6 and (now...) 3.12. We tell them they can use another version if they want but then they're on their own if there are problems. We guarantee proper operation between 3.6 and 3.12. I just had to make sure our installers worked properly and performed a venv install when appropriate (almost required with 3.12 now) and our code ran without warning and without throwing a wobbler because of missing stuff that was there before 3.12 because I don't want to tell people to spend extra efforts to downgrade and/or mess up their install on Win11.