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Comment by stinky613 | Hacker News Reader

> Is switching to python 3 really that hard?

I think it's more that given their specific codebase it's similarly difficult to switch to python 3 as it is to switch to a number of other, entirely different programming languages. Once you recognize that rough equivalency, then it's worth considering the stability, compile times, necessary production resources, etc of those other programming languages.

If your project's specific dependencies are so intrinsically stuck on a python 2.x implementation you might be caught between having to redesign that dependency in-house or switching to a language where you wouldn't need to do that in-house work.

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> it's similarly difficult to switch to python 3

But that's almost certainly not the case. Even if their existing codebase relies very heavily on the small subset of Python2 features that require manual porting, switching to Python3 will be much less work than rewriting everything in a new language.

The Python 2 to 3 conversion was only part of it. The libraries were a huge difference for us.

I will agree that porting to Python 3 would be less work than porting to Go, but we believe that the difference is less than people would suspect.

Never announce a plan to do something. Announce the results after doing it.

If you announce a plan, you're making a bet (sometimes with your reputation) that's it's going to be successful, and telling the world about it.

If however, you didn't announce it, you could still get the benefit of success, or make it looks like learning the lessons of a failed experiment.

We have the good fortune of not having to be super secretive about our tech. We _want_ to talk about this project as we go along and share what we learn. We've already got more interesting stuff to talk about, and it'd be a lot less interesting, I think, without this context for the overall project.

As mentioned in the post, a small piece of our GraphQL schema is already in Go running in production. This blog post isn't just "we're thinking of doing this thing". It's "we've already done a bunch of research, thinking, _and_ built some of it."

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should have done it. And sometimes that's only found out in hindsight.

Indeed, that's true. I just think we have more to gain by talking about what we're doing and seeing what the community thinks about some of our approaches rather than keeping it all private for the next year.

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