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Comment by protomikron | Hacker News Reader

Actually I think the transition to Python3 went pretty well. Most people are on 3 now, and Python's ecosystem is thriving.

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3 came out in 2008. [0] I don’t think 13 years is “pretty well.”

There was still lots of python2 package installs [1] even after 2.x officially ended.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python [1] https://dev.to/hugovk/python-version-share-over-time-6-1jb8

The original plan was to have a transition period of about 10 years. Didn't we have almost exactly that?

The original plan was for Python 2 support to end in 2015.

My company had to spend a ton of engineering time to migrate to 3

Still not done. Plus the burden of having to upgrade applications that don't make sense to from a financial perspective is totally not cool.

We've barely started (we produce embedded router/fw appliances.) We've written up our backlog items to start tackling it but when you're under a constant crunch to get features and bug fixes out the door, PM will never prioritize willingly introducing subtle bugs across the entire codebase unless there's an extremely strong reason to upgrade.

Unfortunately "no longer receives security updates" isn't strong enough. Until we can't ship a new feature without Python 3, we'll be on 2 for a long time.

We're in a similar state for web apps: No one wants to put extensive developer time on something with nothing new to sell.

It's this + they broke stuff that didn't need to be broken + made it hard / impossible to target both 2 and 3 and/or code incrementally in 3 on top of a 2 code base.

The other nightmare is if a dependency isn't actively maintained you have also port your DEPENDENCIES over. Straight waste of time in many many cases. And your PM is asking (fairly) what new cool feature do we get? And you say - the program will run more slowly after all this stupid work. And boy - did things run more slowly especially in the early version - you upgraded and then got crap as a result so PM is asking why all this work made things WORSE for users.

It only took 13 years.

How long does it normally take to transition the community around a programming language to a new version that makes substantial changes?

Ruby 1->2 and php 4->5 and 5->7 went a lot faster.

On the other hand getting everybody from Fortran 90 to Fortran 2008 will probably take at least one more decade ;)

Depends on what you mean by substantial changes, but Delphi changed its string type from ANSI to Unicode some time ago, similar to what Python did.

For the vast majority of users it was a very easy transition, due to the substantial work done by the Delphi team to make it so. For a lot of programs, a mere recompilation was required. We had a 300kLOC program + dependencies at that time, and one of us spent a 2-3 days on migrating, fixing small issues and testing.

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