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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

To me, unicode alone was worth the switch. I will go to great length to avoid the hell that is unicode in Python 2.

Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release. I get that there was a series of data science libraries that wasn't supported initially, but seems to have been solved at this point. So I really do see why people continue to hate Python 3.

I'm not going to argue that the transition couldn't have been handled more smoothly, the period of broken libraries and terrible performance was a little too long.

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>Besides speed, I never seen any good argument that would make me start a new project on 2.7, rather than the latest v3 release.

That's because you start "new projects". Some of us have 10+ years of codebases to maintain, and we don't care for Python 3 features...

If you don't care about the Python 3 features, then don't migrate. I suspect that the issue is that you want at least some of the features, but the cost of moving 10+ years of Python 2 to Python 3 just aren't worth the benefits of those new features.

While I do believe that your point is still valid, one also have to accept that Python 2 will be a legacy platform at some point. In the long run I don't view that as much different than people complaining about Visual Basic 6 being deprecated.

Python 3.0 was released in 2008. Python 2 will EOL in 2020. You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL. A 12-year upgrade window sounds pretty reasonable.

>You've had about 9 years to start the transition to 3.0, and you still have 3 more years before EOL.

Most of those years library support was non-existent or lacking. And still today the majority uses Python 2.x (Pypi stats).

So it's not like the migration was some great success since the start, and all those years were just wasted by some minority not migrating.

In the end, it's not a discussion on HN or what the "BDFL" says about an official EOL that will settle the matter, but actual adoption in the field. But in addition to the low adoption rate, we've even seen people leave Python for Go and Node/JS.

I think I know the chart you're referring to, but I can't find it. I remember Python 2 was in the majority in that case. Do you have the source handy?

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