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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Some shared hosting providers are still offering Python 2.6 as their main offering.[1] Optionally, there's Python 3.2, probably the worst 3.x version.

[1] https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/what-software-and-pro...

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I was Googling “HostGator Python 3” and found you said the same thing last year on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16808998

We knew in April 2014 that Python 2 was EOL in 2020.

Yes, I was hoping for some progress at HostGator so I could get rid of the last Python 2.x I have running. But I can't, yet.

I bet there is still some shitty hosting company somewhere offering Perl4 CGI script hosting.

Doesn't mean we should do anything except laugh at their incompetence (or perhaps be impressed by their ability to monetise other people's incompetence...)

Until it becomes a vector for malware. Shouldn't be laughed at, since it's going to waste person hours in the future.

No idea about CGI hosting, but I do allow perl 4 (and 3 and 2 and 1) scripts to run on my pastebin, https://perl.bot/ . In this case it's not incompetence but insanity.

Nice!

Much respect. That’s retro-cool.

That's also why I added COBOL, that and to test some ideas on how to handle compiled languages on it. The backend service supports multiple files but I haven't finished the web side of things to handle that (I have a strange requirement to make it work without javascript).

If you're after stupid suggestions, would it be "breaking your personal rules" to use only enough Javascript to allow just enough of a transpiled version of the in-browser Java runtime to let '90s vintage Java Applets run? Or maybe Flash?

(And no, I'm 100% not offering to do any of the work required to make that come true... ;-) )

I'd be willing to try something like that, but both flash and java applets are horrendously complex. The javascript restriction is because it's mostly used by us perl developers on irc and there's a few disgruntled greybeards that will actually use it via lynx or links. Closest thing for flash is shumway, https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ which might be possible to make work but it's still got a lot of compatibility issues from what i hear.

How did you get the older Perls working? (I've tried and failed to get them to build on Ubuntu.)

Manually patching the source in a few places, most of the time it's just adding a header file or two since some of them predate ANSI C and the standardized header files. The other things have to do with adding -DHAS_... to force them to know that opendir and friends are actually present, so that make install will actually work.

Any chance you could release the patches?

PHP-style shared hosting is not where Python users are. The shared-hosting story for Python has always been pretty bad, with rare exceptions (webfaction, before godaddy swallowed it). Python users are overwhelmingly on VPS and PaaS, where versions can be easily upgraded. Any PaaS provider without Python 3.6+ at this point is not worth paying for.

HostGator moves slow as frozen molasses but they do when they have to. Case-in-point, they rolled out Let's Encrypt support like the week that Chrome starting marking HTTP pages insecure.

As they are on CentOS 6 it would be impractical to switch to another version as default as Python is used by the system, however they do have 2.7 installed.

CentOS 6 itself is EOL late next year.

With Software Collections[1], using more recent Python versions on CentOS 6 is trivial. Bad excuse.

[1]: https://softwarecollections.org/

> Shared hosting providers

Like Google App Engine lol. GAE Standard Environment doesn't support Python 3.

This is incorrect. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python3/

You're technically correct in that GAE standard offers python 3, but it's not the same as their python 2 offering.

Python 2 is part of the first generation runtimes, python 3 is part of the second generation runtimes. They are not out of the box compatible, even if your python code works on 2 and 3. The first generation runtime included many APIs that are simply just not available in the second gen (you need to build them yourself). See link for more info.

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/runtimes

This is true for Go as well.

GAE has been a favorite of mine for years, but now they seem hellbent on ruining it, and I don't understand why ='(

(On the plus side, other things are improving and Run looks good)

I have numerous apps on their original standard environment. I'd have to rebuild huge parts of every single one of them for this completely different environment.

The original standard environment has a free tier and doesn't require billing and as such is great for everyone who can't or don't want to enter their credit card information.

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