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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Python 3 is better than python 2 and people will soon switch.

Programming language upgrades are not the same as blockchain upgrades. Blockchains work on consensus, so you need a majority of nodes to agree with your changes to the chain or you risk a hard fork. At any rate, ETH2 proof-of-stake is already live, the last remaining piece is The Merge, which merges the existing proof-of-work chain into the already live and operational ETH2 proof-of-stake validator nodes.

People have largely switched already. Py2 is gone from default installs these days. So yes, even if it takes a while, people often do switch to better solutions.

https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8

It seems like Python 2 is still pretty prevalent, with over 40% of new downloads taking place as of last year. And people forget Python 3 was originally introduced in 2008. So the transition is taking decades, not years.

The last place I worked was still using Python 2 as of last year, and they were a startup without all the bureaucracy of a big company. They also had plenty of money and engineers. Python 2 is still the default for everybody I know.

PyPI stats for "six", the second most popular package, that's used for 2/3 compatibility in tons of libraries, shows 80% of its millions of daily downloads are for Python 3. [1] The proportion for "requests", a building block for a ton of long-standing packages, is even higher.

Anyone using Python 2 at this point are either supporting legacy software, getting their runtimes/packages from distros rather than PyPI, or otherwise completely checked out of the modern Python ecosystem.

1: https://pypistats.org/packages/six

There are people who are not using segwit on Bitcoin even though it means they spend twice as much on Bitcoin transaction fees.

https://transactionfee.info/charts/payments-spending-segwit/

That statistics end at most interesting time: December 2019.

Starting with January, python 2 was officially EOL, and many packages dropped support for it. Right now developing for Python 2 is kind of tough, because most dependencies won't work.

Well if Python 2 had a logic bomb that literally makes it unusable after the end-of-life date, that would be true.

It kind of has.

I mean if you don't touch your code it will continue to work but if you have to maintain it, you quickly realize that a lot of your dependencies will refuse to work.

It might be easy to fix them to work again, but with time it will be more and more work to do.

Ethereum's original logic bomb was set to trigger in 2017. Then later it was updated to trigger in 2017. And then later it was updated to trigger in 2018, and then 2020, and currently I believe it's set to trigger in 2022.

But there's no political reason to believe that they won't just push it out again. It's just a ceremony at this point.

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