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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

You forgot one:

- 90% of business code is written in Python 2.x

We've switched from 2.7 to 3.4 (and upwards to 3.5, 3.6) in about a month or so. It delayed some deployments but nothing serious.

If you do it step-by-step it's not that hard. The worst part was str/binary conversions but afterwards everything was a lot easier and better to maintain.

If your company is big enough you should maintain and keep it up-to-date, not "it just works"(TM) and hope for the best after 10 years. The death of 2.7 was already in the air for years.

It's not that hard unless you had some very advanced code utilizing Python 2 internals that were significantly changed in Python 3. However, conversion takes a lot of time and if something works, why should you be forced to change it?

Not referring to parent specifically. By "you", I'm referring to all python 2 hardliners out there.

Nobody's telling you to change your codebase. You're free to carry on using python 2.x. If it already works, it will continue to work in its current environment.

So why are you attempting to tell others in the python ecosystem, be it core maintainers, package authors or OS vendors, support your continued use of python 2 for free?

You want support beyond 2020, pay for it.

Nobody is forcing you to do anything. The developers of Python aren't volunteering their labor to continue to support older versions of Python. RHEL is deciding not to continue to support older versions of Python past their EOL per their developers. Seriously, Python is free software, libre and gratis. You are completely free to do whatever you want to with Python 2.7, except expect other people to do the work for you.

Various intranet pages at my company "work" in IE6/7 or whatever and nobody seems to be rushing to fix them. That kind of sucks, though.

IE6/7 objectively sucks. One could argue Python 3 sucked more than Python 2 based on performance benchmarks even year ago. IMO both Python 2 and Python 3 are pretty messed up languages with similarly messed up libraries, and "pythonic" way is often meaning "idiomatic" in the ugly sense of the word. But I do Deep Learning, data science and stuff with Boto/MWS on Amazon, so I have to stick with it. However seeing all the warts Python 3 throws at me and a crowd of people nagging to switch all the time, I frankly don't see much value in switching from one set of warts to another set of warts, waste the most precious thing I have - time, and all that just to duplicate what I already had (and disliked developing in Python anyway, but it was the fastest way).

Because non-IT users (your customers) are sick and tired of apps from 2000 that run clunky and ugly because someone is "forcing you change it" (aka doing your job) and you don't feel like it. Yes,

I know some extremely well-written apps from 2000 without trendy obfuscating flat interface, and many trendy albeit unusable monstrosities from the past 3 years. What kind of argument did you make?

Embracing pure technical churn is no ones job. That's why Python3 is viewed as a problem by so many. People embrace true technical innovation, which it is not.

even if it's "easy", does not mean it's "simple", or "quick". ever maintained a plone/zope instance? life is too short to convert that to python3 :}

yeah and 90% of business code is also written in COBOL and another 90% in MUMPS, but somehow the world continues to work despite the fact that they've been pining for the fjords for decades.

There is obviously a massive jump from COBOL to Python, and small but annoyingly incompatible step from Python 2 to Python 3. I hope you understand the difference. It's not like Python 3 was the best language ever, it's just a variation (and IMO not that great one to justify breaking backwards compatibility) of the same theme. Ask Perl guys how they liked a similar situation.

If I didn't need to use Python, I wouldn't. Now why I have to rewrite my old code to v3 if it works? Why do I have to waste time with such a stupid thing? All my new code is v3, but why is somebody nagging me about v3 all the time when v3 is full of warts and mindblowing conceptual holes as well, and doesn't really address multi-threading (GIL love forever) etc.? Coming from C++/Java to Python world it was like throwing away a lot of powerful stuff in exchange for faster time to write. Didn't expect that would be dragged down by additional time to rewrite because of some half-baked API-breaking changes.

A similar situation to Python 2->3 in Perl is from Perl 5.6 to Perl 5.26 with the difference being that Perl maintains mostly backwards compatible.

If you are talking about Perl 5->6 that is more like going from C++ to D. (With a touch of Haskell+Go mixed in)

For several years we have been considering the two current Perl's as sister languages. Both are being actively developed with a yearly stable release for Perl 5 and a quarterly stable release for Perl 6. (Rakudo Perl 6 is mostly written in Perl 6 or subset language, and is also a newer codebase; so it is easier to change without breaking things.)

You don't have to rewrite it, just like you don't have to rewrite your COBOL or MUMPS or RPG or any of the other all-caps languages.

In another 20-30 years Python may very well be added to that list (though less annoyingly capitalized). No one will have to rewrite their Python into whatever the new thing is then either.

But not re-writing ProgramX into LanguageX+1 is not LanguageX's authors' problem or CompanyX-no-longer-using-LanguageX's problem.

If they called Python 3 e.g. Cobra or Boa Constrictor or even Turbo/rapid/mega Python or similar nonsense, nobody would likely complain as it would clearly distinguish itself from existing ecosystem and all the enthusiasts could jump on the wave, boasting how much better it is, that it comes from the original authors of Python and then go through usual Darwinian selection to see if they prevailed. But breaking compatibility in a major way doesn't make a lot of people happy, when the gains are small, as with v3.

Yes they would. The apocalyptic doomsaying that would have happened if Guido had said "oh hey guys we're going to stop developing python here in a bit" would have been off the fucking charts.

At least in our shop it's the other way around.

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