[April Fools 2021] Python 4.0! New old print, mandatory static typing, StackOverflow integration

Key Takeaways

hello everyone i'm james murphy and as you can see i am on python.org with some huge news python 4.0 has just been released let's take a look pep401 outlined some of the major changes coming in python 4 and here are the big ones we have new old print syntax mandatory static typing and stack overflow integration i've already taken a quick look at these but i'm just going to go through sort of the abstract reasoning and sort of give you my impressions as we read through it so let's just read through it together okay so it's going to tell us about the new features coming in python 4. the 4.0 series is reserved for groundbreaking changes in the python language and this is nothing less than that okay good ever since the original breaking changes made in the 2-7-3-0 transition the community has been primarily split down version lines agree surveys have found the average python programmer spends over fifty percent of their work time converting two to three with over ninety percent of that time um putting parentheses around print statement arguments definitely in python four the old print syntax is going to be reintroduced so that you don't have to change that old code anymore it will just start working again that's awesome and of course the newer print function is going to still be supported next we have a fundamental change to the type system uh python was initially developed as a dynamic type system but it was too flexible to allow offline optimizations by optimizing the pilers in python 4 type annotations will become mandatory on all function arguments return types and variables that cannot be statically deduced the standard library will be typed completely with the exception of the explicit duct type and so most code depending solely on standard library functions and types will not need much change this is a huge change it's completely overhauling the type system type annotations are now mandatory but what do we get for this an average speed increase of over thirty 000 percent and memory usage decrease of 50 percent across the entire standard library again huge change huge benefit finally python has long been known for how easy it is to develop and yada yada yada we're partnering with stack overflow to bring automated stack overflow report yields uh in short any time an unhandled exception reaches the interpreter the source code accessible state of the stack and heap all variables and values in scope will automatically be uploaded and published to stack overflow along with the relevant stack trace as a question to a dedicated python overflow section of the site for other users to debug that means when you have an error you don't even have to post it on stack overflow anymore it's already covered and like i said before this was just accepted last night apparently it was a unanimous vote by the python language committee and it's coming soon to a python near you this just all happens so fast i mean there are so many new features coming huge changes coming um i'm not even sure exactly what to say i mean it all sounds really really good so i just wanted to give you my take uh my first impression on these changes it's probably going to be like a year before you know the release actually happens um but i'm always looking ahead always looking forward to that next release so let me know what you think of these changes down in the comments don't forget to like comment and subscribe i'll see you next april fools yes obviously this is an april fool's joke there is no python 4 yet and none of these things are ever going to be implemented in python