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Comment by joslin01 | Hacker News Reader

It was coherent and I would not define it as snark. You don't comprehend his point yet you have the wherewithal to label it as incoherent & snarky -- that's snarky. But I digress..

Python users had a choice to stay in 2.7 land or make changes to their codebase for not much in return. Many chose to stay in 2.7 land, which you could safely say is stagnant. As a result, if you can't keep moving with Python, where will you go?

Since Python users have a choice to stick in 2.7 and get no rewards for it or jump into new languages that are evolving, they're going to jump into new languages and these same people are going to start saying things like "python is dead" because in their 2.7 eyes, it is dead.

Finally, unless I'm missing out on some serious deadpan sarcasm, he concludes "Don't worry it's not a bad thing" because look at Perl who everyone says is dead.

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> if you can't keep moving with Python, where will you go?

I think it's too soon to tell about the python 2 to 3 switch. I see people on here all the time making remarks about how many years its been and people still aren't on Python 3, but honestly, it's a big change and it takes a while to upgrade.

Python 2 is still supported (till 2020) and that's the line in the sand for a lot of companies. Many companies will have this in their roadmaps, but don't see a need to prioritise upgrading over other business priorities just yet.

I work at a small company for which this is the case. We absolutely will upgrade to Python 3 (before 2020), and can't wait to do so - there's loads of cool stuff in Python 3! But with a large codebase written in 2.7, this is not something we can just do in a weekend sprint. It will take several months of development and careful testing of our many dependencies. I'm sure many companies are in the same boat.

This clearly doesn't mean Python is dying. Both versions of python are still supported, and many, many people are actively using them and producing quality software. It's a great ecosystem to be part of :)

Maybe you think you "comprehend" his point because you decide to interpret it in your own way. But it was not coherent (and honestly I'm not even sure if that was a snark in there or not, mostly because it was incoherent).

No, it was interpreted pretty much correctly, except for the Perl part, which I should clarify.

Perl is definitely dead, I think most people know that. The link was posted to illustrate that other links from that site were painting incorrect picture.

How is a tool like Perl dead when it's still heavily used on hundreds of thousands of machines all over the world? Is C dead as well? I would say, a tool is dead when it's no longer in wide use. Perl is hardly in that category quite yet.

It's dead because new projects aren't started in Perl unlike C.

Your point stated more generally is that while C is the best tool for a wide set of use cases, for each of the one-time use cases of Perl there is now a better option

Are you saying it's a better investment to jump to another language altogether than to jump from 2.7 to 3.5?

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