Vue 2 to Vue 3 - 8 months on
Vue 3 has been out for almost 8 months now. Adoption is slow. This is feeling a little like another major version bump I’ve lived through. Is Vue the new Python?
When I started developing this go around, I was getting into Python and I was confused about Python 2 vs Python 3 and what I should be using. This was back in 2015, and the support for Python 3 was very low. Similarly, Vue 3 has been released for 8 months now and it is still considered the @next version. Articles and talks all point to using Vue 3, but to a new user, everything still points to Vue 2. This creates confusion and bad messaging.
Recently, Vue.js announced that version 3.1 would be a migration build to help people move from version 2 to version 3. Realistically, the move from version 2 to 3 will take more than just a migration build. The ecosystem has not really caught up, though several major players are close to having or already have Vue 3 compatible versions.
As we move closer and closer to a full year of Vue 3 having been released, I worry that we are starting to veer into the quagmire the Python community experienced when they released Python 3. It took them 14 years to sunset Python 2, and it is still being used by many operating systems all the while having a tool that will help you move from Python 2 to 3 (it still couldn’t fix all the issues). When I was learning Python in 2015, Python 2 was still the main version being used primarily and it took another 3 years before Python 3 was the majority version.
Learning Python, I was constantly confused as to why the example I was trying to use wasn’t working. Either I would be in a Python 2 tutorial and a Python 3 interpreter or visa-versa. The older tutorials wouldn’t mention Python 3 as they were not updated, and the new tutorials were not good about explaining that you needed to make sure you were using the right version.
I love Vue (much as I still love Python) but we as a community need to recognize that the current messaging needs to not be “NEW COOL SHINY VUE 3” but we need to focus on “Here’s how you can move from 2 to 3”. The Python ecosystem spun their wheels for years because there was not a good path to move up a major version. If we as a community do not focus on helping people move from Vue 2 to Vue 3 now, then we will spend years having to support both.