I like this idea and disappointed it always gets a negative reaction. One of my
biggest peeves is this:
import datetime # or
from datetime import datetime
Which is often confusing... is that the datetime module or the class someone
chose at random in this module? A minor thorn that… just doesn't go away.
On 2021-11-11 07:38, Eric V. Smith wrote:
The costs of migration are also too high. I personally work on a 20 year old
proprietary python code base that would never be updated for a change like this.
>
like: "str = 'foo'". But even if a perfect tool existed, it would take
man-months and many tens of thousands of dollars to test such a large code base.
My clients are understandably unwilling to do that for no functional gain.
My current work is on a ~15 year old code base. Had to do a number of upgrades
over the years. 2.x to 3.x was the big one. Luckily there was not a lot of
text encoding work so porting was straightforward, and the project was improved
for the effort. Despite the failures and grumbling there are success stories as
well.
A lot of folks are understandably hesitant at repeating the 2 vs 3 divide. But
I think some learned the wrong lesson from that experience.
The lesson wasn't that we shouldn't improve anything, but that we shouldn't
change anything *fundamental.* Fundamental improvements generally can't be
automated, they sometimes have to be rebuilt from the ground up. I agree that's
a no-go.
But this thread is about a rename with aliases for compatibility.
Recently we brought the same project from the ~3.5 era to 3.8 idioms using the
tool pyupgrade. Have you tried it? Made short work of moving forward. Project
is now more readable, using better language features.
It took a few hours from an existing maintenance budget—not tens of thousands of
dollars. Not only that, (combined with other refactoring) the code is more fun
to work on now. Yes, you read that right, enjoyment has increased due to
improved readability, appearance, and quality.
No, we couldn't afford to rewrite it from the ground up. But, running a tool to
fix the case of a few confusing names is a small win for a small cost. I would
like to continue the process.
+1 for stdlib, not including typing scope creep,
-Mike
_______________________________________________
Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org
To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/
Message archived at
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/7DQAXLLLNWKRJAWBU2QPUBYH4LRSP746/
Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
