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Comment by thehardsphere | Hacker News Reader

> If you and a billion other people want Python2 so badly, fork it and keep developing it. If the maintainers want to push a language in one way, that is their prerogative! It is their time they are using.

Seriously. If all of the time spent on whining on the Internet about how python3 killed the dinosaurs was used to make a python2 interpreter, a viable fork would already exist.

I mean, there's allegedly a great economic incentive for it, right? All of these business-critical python2 apps are out there, so the whiners claim, you'd think somebody would pay for one if it was actually so much better than python3.

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There's a fork that was featured on HN a while back, called python2.8 back then, now apparently it's https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

(FTR I'm one of the folks that think Python 3 is an improvement over Python 2 but we still have a monster 2.7 code base that won't be ported any time soon).

Yeah, that fork gained nothing but negative attention here on HN and Reddit; the general consensus was "why would you do that; Python 3 is so much better". In the face of that criticism, is it any surprise that people are reluctant to create forks?

This all reminds me a fair bit of the transition from VB6 to Visual Basic .NET from about 15 years back.

There was a whole lot of wailing about how the changes were unnecessary, and a whole lot of complaining about how expensive it was going to be to rewrite all this existing code. It was all very visible, but if you paid too much attention to it you'd fail to notice that there was also a huge and quiet majority of people who recognized that VB.NET was a much more capable language that allowed people to easily go places they could barely have dreamed of with VB6. I suspect those people were so quiet because they were too busy doing useful work like keeping their toolchain up-to-date to spend much time griping on the Internet.

So on the Python side of things, it's the exact same story. I see plenty of blog posts and suchlike by people who are still upset about Python 3, but I'm hard pressed to met someone who feels that way in real life. Most folks I know made the switch ages ago, and are a bit mystified that this whole thing is still such a big deal.

Yeah, except VB6 was everywhere and I don't remember the last time I heard about Visual Basic .NET. Perhaps there's a lesson here. FWIW, I've yet to work at a place that uses Python 3 in production, or has any concrete plans to transition.

This.

I actually use VB.NET at work to strong effect. It enables us to hire domain experts (insurance) and have them working as developers in a week. And you get the full .NET compatibility to networking for updates, PDF libraries, crypto, etc. Everything you'd need for a first class desktop app, with much greater freedom on who you can hire (compared to Java, c#, etc).

But I'd never dream of wanting to build a "weekend app" in VB.NET anymore. You're basically stuck with a very heavy IDE, to fill in boilerplate and do builds. And there's lots of framework churn here so a template you'd have from 2011 would probably be a huge pain to try and implement today.

Never used VB6, but from what I understand it, it was a huge productivity tool: any small task could get coded up and shipped in a day. That's how I think of python right now, I don't want to see it go the way VB. We already have enough enterprise ready type languages, not everyone has to be one.

C# does some useful stuff that VB.NET doesn't, while the only thing VB really did better than C# is COM without interop libraries. So VB.NET ended up just being a bridge to C#, so it died out pretty quickly. I still encounter it a fair bit, but it's usually just the oldest modules in a codebase where everything new is in C#.

Funny, it seems that, by the standards of the OP, the fork you mentioned is not "Python 2" either. It backported type annotations, async/await, and many more from Python 3. So when are we expected to see a "true" Python 2 fork? :)

What would a fork that didn't add anything to the language look like? Wouldn't that just be Python 2.7?

It could be "just" python 2.7 with security updates / bug fixes, since the official python 2.7 won't be getting them from 2020.

What's your plan when 2020 rolls in and 2.7 is no longer patched?

Good question. Nobody wants to invest time in the codebase, because it's supposed to be replaced. However judging by the current rate, it won't be gone by 2020.

I guess when 2020 comes around, we'll be shell-shocked to find that python 2.7 isn't supported anymore, and we'll find some unofficial package source for python 2.7 that will keep us afloat for a few more years.

Surely tauthon should be python6.2 ?

/ducks from downvotes

> a viable fork would already exist.

Enthusiasm and passion do not a viable fork make. The number of people who are truly able to grok and work on the core of Python2 who are not already working for the PSF can probably be counted on one hand, without using all of your fingers.

> you'd think somebody would pay for one

And yet such fundamental projects like NTP and OpenSSL show that need and use does not create money for those projects. Instead, those with money or time create their own versions (Apple, Google, BSD).

"Create their own version" means they pay for it, just not by giving money or time to the people who are doing the main project. If Apple, Google etc are paying for their own NTP and SSL versions, that's clearly because it's important to them in some way.

If nobody affected by python2 is going to pay for a python2-fork, python2 must not actually be very important. And yes, PSF might have all the brain trust now, but it's not like a big company whose continuity-of-business really depended on python2 wouldn't attempt to acquire this expertise in some fashion. "Acquire" meaning something as simple as picking a few engineers on staff and saying "learn everything you can about this so we can maintain our own version."

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