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daveguy

The unofficial python 2.8 is here:

https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

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But didn't Guido say that everything what could be backported was already backported?

> There are a small handful of backwards incompatibilities introduced by Tauthon.

How to understand this?

Anyway, something like this was expected to happen. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if Guido would not halt python 2 development and just let it evolve.

He left the door open for the community to continue work on Python 2. It looks like somebody took up that offer.

Yes and no. Community can continue, but only under different name. So only fork is allowed.

This discussion goes now on since Python 3 was released. Python 2 will not be supported or developed after 2020.

Yes, I know. The question is if this decision is correct, given that apparently a lot of people and companies just doesn't plan to switch no matter what.

Well, if you want people to switch to 3, you do need to apply some pressure by end-of-lifing 2.

Or you could offer something in 3 which will make switching enticing enough for people to do so of their own free will.

Proper unicode handling, list comprehensions, generators, await & async, TSL 1.1 & 1.2 support, better namespace handling, better string interpolation, and better argument parsing are just a few of the things that you get.

Is there a feature that could entice these people? Or have they made up their minds?

List (and set,dict and generator) comprehensions and generators are available in python2. Await & async and unicode handling are nice improvements, but you could do both in python2 well enough if it was important to you. TSL support I don't use in python so I cannot comment on it. And I've honestly never found namespace handling or string interpolation a problem.

Is there a feature that could entice these people? Or have they made up their minds?

A working, stable, version of http://pyparallel.org/ would entice the hell out of me.

It's not practical to safely work with non-ASCII strings in Python 2. There are too many "arbitrarily mangle my string" functions available (both in the language proper and in libraries), and the only way to avoid them is constant vigilance, which doesn't scale.

Serious question: What are the reasons people are still preferring Python2 over Python3? (No troll intended)

No reason per se. Just that lots of people have lots of Python2 code and feel that Python3 doesn't offer anything interesting enough to make it worthwhile to go through the effort of porting their code.

Probably momentum? The only reason is if they are supporting an app that they don't want to move to 3. As a professional Python dev, I can see no other reason. All my new projects are in 3, and as far as I'm concerned, the debate was settled years ago (and there wasn't much of a debate anyway.

On most OSes, open a terminal and type 'python', and you get a python2 REPL. That's reason enough to write a lot of scripty admin / automation stuff in python2. And then if you need to extend that, it's easy to just continue on in python2. It's there, it works, it's stable, you don't have to maintain versions in case of security issues, the OS package does it for you.

It's high time to change that default. I'm glad django will not support Python2 after 2020, making clear it's legacy.

Oh absolutely. There's a few linux distros starting to ship python3 by default, which is great. It's happening far too slowly.

Speaking of speed, I hear 3.7 should finally be able to beat 2.7 for most benchmarks, which is pretty sweet.

To give another example, Ubuntu is moving towards Python 3 by default, the plan is to have it as the only pre-installed Python version by 18.04 LTS, which is only a year away.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python

There's a reason the python command points to Python 2: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/#id16 It is anticipated that there will eventually come a time where the third party ecosystem surrounding Python 3 is sufficiently mature for this recommendation to be updated to suggest that the python symlink refer to python3 rather than python2 .

You can also open a terminal and type 'python3', and get a Python 3 REPL.

I only learned recently that it's a compatibility decision that means that plain 'python' will always be Python 2. However, you're starting to see Python 3 distributed right alongside it in most recent distros.

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