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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

This again? Python 2.7 is never going away, no matter how much people wish it did. Python is the Cobol/Java of dynamic languages. There is way too much volume of code written in it. This means there is a golden consulting opportunity for those willing to take it: support 2.7 code/libraries for money.

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This again indeed, because Python 2.7 is going away. Python 3 is the future, and we've been resting on our "eh, python 2.7 is convenient enough" mindset for too long. We should just bite the bullet and move to 3, which isn't even that bad of a migration.

Also, "supporting legacy code for money" is already everyone's job, unless you're implying that there are as many Python programmers as there are COBOL ones.

Python 2.7 is not going away and why do you care anyway? People like you and the author of this website should just fuck off. People like Python 2.7, just let them.

That's incredibly naïve. Python 2 will be around and have new software written with it for at least a decade to come. Keep saying "Python 3 is the future", that will surely make companies invest in switching. Meanwhile ford still uses 40 year old IBM mainframes with COBOL, and will continue to do so until they are physically unable.

You've just proved his point by comparing Python 2 with 40 year old mainframes. There will always be users of legacy software, but that doesn't stop it from being, well, legacy software.

As others posters have commented, Python 2 will survive in the sense that there will always be some code running on it (and there will be a niche market for dark artists who can massage it). Python 2 will not survive in the sense that no one will be writing new code for it. Python 3 is already commonly used for new projects and it's scheduled to get several big boosts in that direction as Ubuntu and Fedora switch to it as the default Python.

The old meme that it's unsafe to use Py3 is not true anymore. Practically all of the big libraries work fine on Python 3 now. Py3 code is going to be dominant in new projects in short order if it isn't already, and it's plausible that new Py2 projects will be virtually extinct by 2020.

> ford still uses 40 year old IBM mainframes with COBOL,

What are they using it for?

I would be so happy if our company could migrate everything to Python 2.7. We still have a lot of 2.5 and 2.6 around.

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