Comment by jprzybyl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jprzybyl | Hacker News Reader

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Obsolete is a funny word to use. In this case, it would mean that Python 2 is in good working order, but is no longer wanted. That's bound for a flame war, because:

- There is a community that wants it (largely enterprise).

- The Python team does not want it.

A less controversial word is deprecated - the Python team is discouraging use of Python 2, but not prohibiting it's use or development. That's fair, and if you read this page:

https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

they are not very opinionated about it, largely saying "Use 3, unless you can't, then use 2 and start trying to migrate, unless you can't, then just use 2."

I will say, not to give somebody a bad day but, 2.8 seems like a bad idea. Currently python's development has still largely been a straight line, which is good for transitioning, but 2.8 would cause a fork. It would give a lot of people a short-term win for a long-term lose. Better not to tempt people.

Obsolete was a wrong word to use, I admit that. But from an integrator's perspective supporting both versions is a mess. The problem is that the interpreter has the same name (python), the libraries export the same symbols (well, same names, different signatures for extra fun) etc.

Like you said, Python team sees the 3.x series as the successor AND as a replacement for Python 2.x. They were never meant to exist one beside the other (or, there was no thought put into this before the release).

From my perspective, giving people the choice between 2 or 3 will only give us problems down the road, which is why I vehemently discourage it.

And yet a transition period is needed.

I wonder what about this made this difficult. Was it because it's a language interpreter? Libraries have this problem sometimes, but not as much. (I never hear of issues with gstreamer between 0.10 and 1.0, for example.) Maybe it was just that a binary called python existed? Maybe we should have just said "screw it, python means python2, end of story."

Don't know. What would you have preferred?

Well, in my ideal world maintainers would have put all possible effort to porting libraries to python 3 and put python 2 versions into legacy mode (e.g.: security updates, fork it if you want to continue on the 2-branch).

In my field what seemed to keep people on python 2 for a long time was numpy or scipy (or both, I do not remember which) which did not get a 3 upgrade for a long time.

Either that, or just call it something different, kind of like perl6. There is no perl6 distribution shipping a perl library or some perl.dll that clashes with perl5.

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