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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

migrating from python 2 to 3 is such a large task that migrating to any other language is a comparable effort. this is not just a library problem the language itself changed significantly

source: no python services at my company are going to be migrated to python 3; it’s all moving to a JVM

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> migrating from python 2 to 3 is such a large task that migrating to any other language is a comparable effort

I'm going to call BS on that one.

If you're having issues with Python 2, then it might make more sense to switch to another language instead of upgrade to Python 3. But going from Python 2 to 3 is much easier than switching languages completely.

Python is not a perfect language. There is no perfect language. It sounds like your company just had a reason for switching to a JVM language and the Python 2 EOL was a justification to start.

I agree - the statement that migrating from Python 2 to Python 3 is a comparable effort to migrating from Python 2 to Go feels grossly exaggerated.

AT least, it is more exciting for a developer to migrate from Python 2 to Go than to Python 3. :D

I'm skeptical too but if they're doing a lot of communication with other services and they relied on bytes and ASCII just working and the code isn't backed up by tests then I can see them having a very bad time going from Py2 to Py3.

N=1 and all that, but I ported 500k lines of a Python 2 monorepo to Python 3 this year and it took like two weeks, including a week spent reading Eevee’s post on the subject half a dozen times and playing with six and futurize.

Migrating to 2-3 can be a large task in some very rare cases possibly, but for the most part it is practically effortless if you don't have to support both simultaneously. The biggest hurdle might be the "fear" of the unicode change, but that can be dealt with.

Source: All python services at my current workplace are in the process of being migrated to 3.*, and I'm doing one of the main ones at the moment and it's a breeze, including compiled c-extensions.

For curiosity, a good list of actual python3 syntax changes: https://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#over...

What? I've done it on some sufficiently large code bases, and small ones, and it was done way faster then a rewrite. With tools like 2to3 you can assign it to an intern and have it done pretty quickly.

It's not quite that easy.

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