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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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).

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.

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 :}

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