Newer programmers have accepted this as "normal". It only started becoming this much ridiculous cumulative upkeep in the past decade or so. It's lazy. Lazy on behalf of the Python maintainers. And you keep accepting it instead of pushing back. You could have only one version, but you've been brainwashed to think having 5 versions of python on your machine is normal.
I'm not dissing version releases, just the adoption and deprecation. I wrote DirectX drivers for years, and going from DX3 to 5 to 7 meant backwards compatibility, and it was a PITA, but releases came out every two years and were deprecated shortly after so we didn't have vast quantities of exponential regressions. OpenGL was rock solid by comparison. The former was trial-and-error by MSoft, the latter was well thought out by consortium.
> Newer programmers have accepted this as "normal". It only started becoming this much ridiculous cumulative upkeep in the past decade or so.
Tell that to users of OpenSSL for the past two decades. Have fun when your dependencies use a different version. And yes, 0.9.7e is not compatible with 0.9.7g because semantic versioning be damned.
From the cost of testing, absolutely. By definition 5 version is 5x more testing. But since most python code is just crap thrown onto githubs and stackoverflow, who cares if it is regressed. But for devs trying to write solid, long-lived code, their cost of testing skyrockets. Python's LTS plan is not strict enough, and releases too frequent. As exhibit A, I give you their attempt at deprecating python2.
Regarding deprecating and moving away from Python 2, this has been discussed ad nauseam and the issues have been recognized around it. By the way, this wasn't a language issue, but an issue managing it.
Having said that, do you have any opinions or anything to discuss around the current plans?
I'm not dissing version releases, just the adoption and deprecation. I wrote DirectX drivers for years, and going from DX3 to 5 to 7 meant backwards compatibility, and it was a PITA, but releases came out every two years and were deprecated shortly after so we didn't have vast quantities of exponential regressions. OpenGL was rock solid by comparison. The former was trial-and-error by MSoft, the latter was well thought out by consortium.