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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, I wonder how many of the people who proclaim "no end in sight" for 2.7 are actually using Python. In the usage I can see, the majority of the ecosystem seems to support 3, and at least a large minority has stopped supporting 2.

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For those of us in the GIS space, 2.7 will be with us for a long time, as it's the only version that is supported by ArcGIS 10.x series. To say that people aren't rushing to ArcGIS Pro (which support 3.x) is quite an understatement, I expect to be writing Python 2.7 code for 5 years at the very least.

Wait, a company is selling a library and only supporting Python 2? And 3 support is a paid tier? Wow.

No, the previous version is called ArcGIS 10, current version is called Arc Pro.

Oh, I see. That's too bad :/

I think they’re both true. People who are “extremely online” and up-to-date with technology developments are all done with Python 2.7 and can say the end is near, but they’re not the only people. There’s an entire dark matter world of businesses still on 2.7, maintained by people who don’t live in the Bay and don’t read Hacker News, and so they’re largely invisible. It will be a long time before they all switch.

Even in the Bay Area there are companies still with Python 2.7 with no real migration strategy yet. I maintain several such packages at work myself.

I don't know, we have a codebase of 100k loc of Python 2.7 and I migrated much of it in two or three weeks myself. I don't think the fact that companies don't spend some time drawing up a strategy is the language's problem.

My company is one of them: plenty of legacy Python and no plans to switch to 3.x that I am aware of.

What about the people who do read HN and comment here? My reply was to one such comment.

Most Python code being written today is almost certainly Python 2. Or at least it's close.

Google is still Py2 I believe, as is Dropbox. These are big Python shops.

I write Python. I don't see an end in sight, yet. There is, however, forward progress.

Writing code compatible with Python 2 and 3 has been possible for over 5 years.

Dropbox migrated to Python 3.[1] So did Instagram.

[1] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/02/incrementally-migrati...

Dropbox migrated their desktop client code to Python 3.

I got the impression from someone at Dropbox that it was more than that. That's all I know, though.

They just spoke at pycon of having 3? Million LoC using mypy. While some of that is probably using the backports (comment syntax), I'd expect that much of it uses the newer syntax and therefore python3.

Google Cloud Functions only support Python 3.7, so Google may be heterogeneous internally.

I had to write some 2.7 the other day - a vendor supplied docker image we needed to run a script on only supported that version. Until stuff like that goes away, we’re still gonna be stuck with 2.7.

In that sense, we're still stuck with FORTRAN, but that's not indicative of the ecosystem at large.

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