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Comment by _old_dude_ | Hacker News Reader

COBOL changes very slowly, once in a decade or two. Python does not offer support of a release for more than 3 years and a half [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

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But a compute instance or bare metal computer that never needs a new release wont have to deal with that in python either

Its only new builds on someone else’s computer that have this modern issue

I could believe there are legacy installations happily humming away on Python 2.7 without issue.

Several years ago I briefly worked at a major telecommunications provider with services across the southern United States that ran Python 2.4 on their production provisioning servers. Worked just fine.

The difference being that the COBOL is still supported after a decade.

ActiveState still offers a supported Python 2.7 version across all major platforms for those who need it (https://www.activestate.com/products/python/python-2-7/), so that's 14 years and counting.

If enough stuff needs it, people will keep it running. Java 8 will probably be in the same boat eventually if/when Oracle finally drops support.

I am not even sure what support is needed at this point. The interpreter is what it is. You know there are no new libraries to integrate.

I guess deploying it on a newer OS which might make it challenging to install unless it is a freshly compiled build?

Patches for security issues, most notably.

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