One impact of the dropping of Python 2 from Linux distributions

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5 points·gerikson··4 comments

You can always fork and maintain the Python2 runtime yourself. Or pay somebody to do it. Or wait and see if a community fork of a maintained Python 2 emerges (or maybe it already has, I haven't really been paying attention to the issue).

But otherwise, I don't have a ton of sympathy here... Python 3 was announced in 2008... people have known that they needed to start moving away from Python 2 for around 12 years. If you're panicking now because Python 2 is about to go away, it's hard not to ask "What were you waiting for?"

A big problem is that Python 2 and Python 3 are simply not the same language. They look a lot alike, but they have substantial differences.

So, it's not just that Python 3 has arrived, but that a separate and widely used language is being killed, in a way that may very well stick.

That's really a rather bizarre turn, and hasn't happened that much in the history of programming languages. I'm having trouble thinking of a similar example. Perhaps Objective-C or VB, but those they were controlled by corporations.

In the open source world, has the stick ever been used before to kill off a language?

How do you kill off an open source project? Anyone is free to continue to maintain and extend Python 2 (possibly under another name).

Kind of, but I do think it's accurate to say that a large contingent is trying to extinguish Python 2 as a language. They wouldn't even deny it.

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