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Comment by jsjohnst | Hacker News Reader

Does your industry still use Windows XP/Vista, or PHP4, or Ruby 1.8.7, or Apache 1.x, or MySQL 4.1 or RHEL 5? Those are roughly equivalent era.

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Python 2.7 is still maintained, and the last version came out in March IIRC, so there's that.

Lots of big players still use Python 2 (Google being the most prominent), and untold smaller players.

Besides, Windows XP and PHP are also in use, as are 50+ year old COBOL systems, so there's that.

Unless you come in and do the port yourself, many systems are not getting ported anytime soon. RedHat and co will continue to release 2.7 patches for the foreseeable future, long after 2020.

Surely the number of eyes looking at that codebase will vastly diminish though? You may get RH and co backporting massively obvious issues but there will be many other smaller issues that won't be found.

Also Google have golang, which I'd imagine would be their target now, not python 3 (for migrations)

>Surely the number of eyes looking at that codebase will vastly diminish though?

I don't think the "many eyes" theory ever panned out. There are projects used by billions, and on which thousands of other FOSS projects work, and only have like a handful of people working at the codebase (and less catching bugs)

>Also Google have golang, which I'd imagine would be their target now, not python 3 (for migrations)

Not really, Golang was never Google's official/mandated language. Just a language some Googlers made with Google's use cases in mind. Google still uses C++, Java, and Python (plus some Dart). Some things use Golang, but not in some top-down "Googlers shall use Golang" way.

Where exactly does Google use python2.7?

Internally, all around. A 2018 answer by a Google engineer:

Build system automation of all kinds (although the main build tool is in Java)

Test automation

Deployment automation

Many services configure their job placement and options with a Python-derived language (not mine)

Monitoring configuration and dashboards

Data analysis using Scipy, Scikit, Numpy and various kinds of notebook UIs

Configuring Tensorflow and analysing the results of ML projects

Hundreds of little command-line utilities for all sorts of small code and data manipulations

Thousands of internal websites

The youtube.com site was still Python last time I looked

One thing I know of off the top of my head (because I had to deal with it last week) is the gcloud suite of tools for GCP, which will only run with 2.7. Thankfully the various GCP libraries for interacting with the platform do work on Python 3.

In an industry where win95 appears to be the norm (if not VAX!) but not complaining when don't see flashy libraries or tools support. It does feel good , when some claim support however.

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