I really don't think this is true at all.
Python 2 to 3 took a really long time, it was a real struggle, lots of people stayed on 2 for a really long time.
But I really don't think Python was close to dying the same way Perl has/is. There was no risk of Python not "surviving" in my opinion.
There was always a clear way forward and people were actually moving. The mass migration of millions or billions of lines of code from 2 to 3 actually happened and has many high profile million+ line migrations, like Yelp or Dropbox.
There was never anything similar for Perl 5 to 6, totally different situation.
I was always of the impression that people were very reluctant to move even though the benefits were clear and the movement not nearly as difficult as people claimed. But I still hear people complain about, for example, how you can't run CPython 2.x bytecode on a modern CPython runtime even though you can't run CPython 3.13 bytecode on a CPython 3.14 runtime, either and that hasn't slowed anyone down at all.
I think another saving grace was, when considering Python 3, one's choice was between "easy-ish migration to best in class" and "difficult rewrite into second-best". Meanwhile with Perl 5/6 it was "two moderately hard migrations into metastasized shell-script has-been language" and "difficult rewrite into best-in-class with lots of upside".
It absolutely was. What saved it was:
1. The data science / AI crowd that was gathering momentum any many only used Python 3.
2. No popular alternative. Perl got python as an alternative.
Python was also a good, simple language and had a good healthy culture. But it's nothing sort of a miracle that it survived that biblical software calamity.
None of my projects needed to worry much about char encoding, and I'd used logging extensively starting under 2.6 or so.
Big players, like Django or SQLAlchemy, kept versions both for 2.x and 3.x for quite some time. This allowed for a smooth transition, when all of your dependencies finally had good versions for 3.x.
The difference between Python 2.x and Python 3.x was not dramatic. I would say it was mostly cosmetic up until 3.5 when async landed. Even with these small changes, the splitting of byte strings and character strings alone (an obvious move towards sanity) was plenty annoying for many projects.
Communities and ecosystems are fragile; sharp turns can easily break them.. Even careful maneuvering, like the Python 2 → 3 transition, put very visible strain on the community. A crazy jump that was Perl 6 was not survivable, even though Raku may be a fine language.
If anything might have killed python it was not python 3 per se but shipping a "beta" version of Py3 as 3.0
Python 3 only got usable really around 3.3 or maybe 3.4
So no, I don't think AI saved Python; it was fine before then.
Original was really rough because the core team had gone in the wrong direction on migration, and the Python io module was hell as well.
By 3.3-3.4 it was relatively smooth sailing but that took a lot of work from the community and core team both (reminder that Python 2.7 was released after 3.1, backporting a number of features to make compatibility easier, and old features were reintroduced as late as 3.5).
Granted, this is coming from a relative noob who read and followed a couple of "how to set up Python properly" articles and that's about it. But I pretty much decided to spend my time on JavaScript, despite its cumbersomeness for implementing simple utilities.
I can easily imagine a scenario where Julia could have taken the data science crowd and Node.js could have taken everyone else. People like Python, I guess.
3. six
`six` was instrumental in repairing the Python schism by giving people a way to incrementally move their 2.7 code to Python 3, and write code that was compatible in both. The six project didn't exist at first and the path to Python 3 was too painful without it. Six solved all that by smoothing over built-in libraries with different casing between versions, incompatible core libraries, the addition of unicode strings, print changing to a function, etc, etc. Perl 5 to Perl 6 (aka Raku) never got that.
In my experience, six was a relatively minor part, and you could get by with your own little compat file for just the stuff you needed, even on relatively big projects. I even found it beneficial to do so because instead of just slapping six.moves everywhere you'd have to re-evaluate some of the old decisions (e.g. at $dayjob at the time we were using all of urllib, urllib2, and requests for HTTP calls, not using six provided strong motivation to just move everything to requests). This also made for a lot less churn when removing Python 2 compatibility.
Python had a history of tooling/libraries that made it well ingrained into academia
It took AdaCore so long to port the plugin system of the GNAT Studio (GPS) to Python 3 (which seems to be a fraction of the whole code base), that even conservative Debian had to remove the whole GNAT-GPS package.
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1082332
I turned down one of those companies because I didn’t want to deal with that migration in 2021
https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/13/mercurial's-journey...
Part of me even wonders if the transition had any role to play in why Mercurial gradually lost whatever foothold it had in the DVCS ecosystem.
If they had just done this from the beginning there wouldn't even have been such upgrade drama in the first place... like, as an obvious example, removing u'' syntax for unicode strings immediately at 3.0 was just idiotic: if it weren't for some dumb decisions like that one there would have been almost no upgrade discontinuity at all (a la Ruby 2's Unicode reboot, which concerned a lot of people but was a nothing-burger next to the insanity of Python 3).
I still to this day stumble upon code I have to use 2.7 on, thankfully things like pipx make it easy these days. but still,switching back and forth could be a pain.
But you're right, it wasn't like Perl 6. People moved to python and php mostly from perl. what were going to move to from python 2? Ruby?
I too was rather upset about the Python 2->3 shenanigans and I was working on much smaller projects.
In 2018, I don't know if Go was a major player, both it and rust were still new-ish languages. There was still a concern of being able to hire devs if you used them, where as not so much in the past 4-5 years.
> This ground rule meant that a mass insertion of b'' prefixes everywhere was not desirable, as that would require developers to think about whether a type was a bytes or str, a distinction they didn't have to worry about on Python 2 because we practically never used the Unicode-based string type in Mercurial.
> In addition, there were some other practical issues with doing a bulk b'' prefix insertion. One was that the added b characters would cause a lot of lines to grow beyond our length limits and we'd have to reformat code.
I wonder if their line length was arbitrarily 80chars or some silly serial terminal like limit.
> It is now 2020 and Python 2 support is now officially dead from the perspective of the Python language maintainers. Linux distributions are starting to rip out Python 2. Packages are dropping Python 2 support in new versions. The world is moving to Python 3 only. But Mercurial still officially supports Python 2
To me it doesn't matter what pain points there were between 2/3, or that it was even python.
That is just the classic way any modernization effort fails. IMHO those failures are almost completely tool agnostic and are cultural failures.
~3.8 at the time, not 3.0. 3.0 was a mess.
There's always Tauthon (Python 2.8), lol.
It was methodical and deliberate, but slow.
But I think it really happened because developers wanted to move to 3. There was enough momentum and upside for moving to 3 that the Python core developers could keep the migration on track without having to drag people along from 2 -> 3 before they were ready. Making sure that the transition was optional for a long time helped tremendously.
I was quite happy working in Python 2 for a long time and only transitioned over to 3 for new projects or code that I thought would have a long lifetime. This was very much a reason why I moved to 3 instead of to another language.
At the same time, I'm not sure what language I would have switched to for the things I was using Python for... Perl was out as it had it's own disastrous migration. Ruby was an option, but never really hit the general-purpose scripting language mark for me.
> if it weren't for some dumb decisions like that one there would have been almost no upgrade discontinuity at all
Having been there and done that, nah, the text model changes alone required significant work to square up in most packages. And there were plenty of other semantics changes.
It's hot garbage for writing simple cross-platform utilities because of the need for an elaborate environment setup, painful dependency management, and constant compatibility breaks.
Uh.. You've started in the middle. Python 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 were insufficiently compatible to support a migration. If not for the effort to reduce 2 to 3 incompatibility by shipping 2.7 and 3.3, 3 could really have failed. I'd say the initial plan was not so good but then the _replan_ after the first setbacks was good.
Django absolutely would have been ported: it was ported without six by Vinay Sajip (building on an earlier work of Martin von Löwis). In fact a limited shim layer was initially committed based on Vinay’s efforts: https://github.com/django/django/commit/5e6ded2e58597fa324c5...
The team ultimately decided to use and re-export six for the convenience of the ecosystem, not out of any sort of necessity.
Its got a big standard library so you can do a lot by just installing Python. On a lot of *nix systems it will all be installed already. For simple use cases you do not have to have the environment manager.
I have had few problems with virtualenv in any case.
Where you are most likely to have problems is cross platform deployment. If you are going to package it as an exe for Windows users, and package it for major Linux distros, and whatever you need to do for MacOS etc. its going to be a pain. In that case there are multiple languages that might suit you better than JS.
Python 2 had both, it was a rename, not a split. unicode -> str, and str -> bytes. The "u" string prefix was also removed, which made migration of string-heavy code more of a pain than it needed to be, until it was added back in in 3.3
Actual language standards that multiple stakeholders agree on are a much better approach.
Platforms should absorb pain, not multiply it across all developers that use the platform. (I wish Apple would learn this lesson.)
Imo the coding part is fine. I have no mayor complains about it. I even like indentation as syntax as long as you use tabs :)
Python is the modern day BASIC. Slow interpreted lingua franca. As long as you are ok with its speed I say go for it. Python is the only scripting language where I maintain constant lingering awareness that every single line of code adds milliseconds to run time. As bad as instantiating new variable costing single digit ms on a GHz CPU. This quickly adds up the more you are trying to achieve.
Example benchmark, Python 3.4:
# Direct Access d['key']: 3.3710 seconds
# Direct Enum Access d[enum.key]: 157.9954 seconds
"Having no popular alternative" is not something that was close to not happening.