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Comment by Ankaios | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don't mind some inconvenience if language designers occasionally need to make breaking changes to allow improvements, and I've had to port enough scientific Fortran code to newer languages to limit my sympathy for porting from Python 2 to 3. Computer languages aren't static, and sometimes I need to do some work to keep up as they evolve.

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I bet the old Fortran versions are supported and compile decades after the 'newer' languages stop being supported...

I have compiled Fortran programs from the 70s on modern platforms without changing a line. The compiler, OS, and CPU architecture had all disappeared but the programs still worked correctly.

I've 'modernised' such an old program then come back a few years later, realised the 'modern' ones don't run anymore and reverted to the old Fortran version.

That is likely a compiler issue. Besides being modern, Fortran 2018, 2008, 2003 have no backward incompatibility issues.

You misunderstand. I 'modernized' to Python (similar to the GP). Then the Python version stopped being supported so I reverted to Fortran..

And Python 2 scripts continue working just fine with the Python 2 interpreter.

Which is no longer supported.

Well, it is open source. I'm not expecting Python 2 to get completely dropped from Linux distros in the near future. (I could be wrong; I will be disappointed if I am.)

There was an article the other day about problems mixing different python versions on Mac. I admittedly didn't read much of it—but I was somewhat baffled by the problem. I have Python 3 installed on my mac as "python3", and Python 2 (which comes with macOS) as just "python". I think that's the right way to treat them—as different, independent interpreters which can co-exist, as do, say, Python and Ruby.

OK but the latest Fortran specification and compilers explicitly support all Fortran77 code and a really large amount of F66 as well.

Will there be Python 3.8 interpreters in 2100? F77 will still compile and run better than it did in the 1980s.

There were minor breaking changes in Python 2.4, 2.5 and so on. So Python certainly had the gradual minor breaking evolution down pat.

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