Comment by nas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nas | Hacker News Reader

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I think the amount of Python 2 source code existing in the world is too large for Python 2.7.x to stop working. A lot of that code is just never going to get ported to Python 3. Companies don't have the budget to do it. So, somehow there will still be a Python 2 interpreter to run the code, even after 2020.

That said, when nearly all of the Python 3rd-party library developers are targeting Python 3, do you really want to be stuck on 2.x? I think that's going to be the ultimate death of new Python 2.x development. The NumPy example seems typical. I.e. the cost of supporting 2.x is very soon not going to be worth it.

It seems clear to me now that there is not going to be a large faction of 3rd party library developers who refuse to move from 2.x. That is unlike Perl 5. As a Python developer, this is very happy result. The 2 to 3 transition was extremely painful but it appears to be mostly behind us now. Having two separate "flavours" of Python (2.x and 3.x) would have been bad.

> I think the amount of Python 2 source code existing in the world is too large for Python 2.7.x to stop working. A lot of that code is just never going to get ported to Python 3. Companies don't have the budget to do it. So, somehow there will still be a Python 2 interpreter to run the code, even after 2020.

Sure, but—as other people mention down-thread—there are still COBOL programs, and even COBOL (maintenance) developers. There's just no community for active, new COBOL development. That's what it means for a language to be EOLed.

> I think the amount of Python 2 source code existing in the world is too large for Python 2.7.x to stop working.

Exactly. And that is the major fuup that Python 3 brought. There was no fundamental reason to make most of the Python 2 code incompatible with the "better" and "newer" version. The really good Python 3 would have accepted most of the Python 2 code and execute it, while allowing the new 3 "goodies."

Only a year ago, I've installed "just" Python 3 on my main computer -- "Python 3 is mature enough" I've thought. Then I wanted to solve some problem X. Found the code that does 90% on the web. Try to run -- doesn't work on Python 3. Adjusting it. It runs after my changes, but I've lost time for something unnecessary. Then I've tried to solve some problem Y. The story repeats. The third time, I've just decided that it's not worth. I've installed 2 again and I can't be happier.

And all that was for my non-Numpy related work. There were some years where the libraries using Numpy were only Python 2, even after Numpy got its own 3 version.

So Python 3 was so very wrong for too long. The worst upgrade path I've lived through. And completely unnecessary. It was absolutely technically possible to make it much much easier to move.

Only Python 3? Are we there? I thought we are not there yet? I thought there is a big push going on for fedora to go Python 3 only and it will likely not end before end of next year? I imagine Debian and Red Hat and Canonical will continue python 2 default for a while?

I'd be happy if I'm wrong though...

> Only Python 3? Are we there?

In my experience, for my purposes and use cases, obviously not, exactly as I wrote above. And it didn't have to be that way for most of the code, I claim that, knowing how little additional code were needed to have a different result: compare with the Linux Kernel, much more complex piece of code, where "kernel never breaks user code" because Linus set that goal. Python is much, much less complex than Linux Kernel, and the same goal was possible: not breaking at least most of code written for 2, while still allowing different new code. The overhead would be insignificant. Note that even without that overhead, Python 3 was (maybe still is) significantly slower than 2. So there is really no valid excuse.

I don't know the details (because I don't understand unicode) but I am not sure what you said is possible.

But to me ASCII seems like a hindrance.

``` fmt.Println("Hello, 世界") ```

This line of go lang looks beautiful. I bet they never have to worry about bytes vs Unicode.

Here is python...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgHbC6udIqc

I'll add one more assertion to the list. People are born and people die. It is not fair for us to impose our mistakes and sins to the next generation. With that being said, my thought was simply all the scripts that are in python (even the simple build for Firefox was python 2 only last time I checked).

The way forward for anyone new to python is for us to tell them: Python 2 doesn't matter. Don't look at it. Learn python by which I mean 3.0+

I still don't get why Google of all places can't support python 3 in its standard app engine. To me it sounds like standard is deprecated for the flexible (which doesn't have a free tier).

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