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Pffft. Nice strawman. Who said it would be free or easy? Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to mainta

Pffft. Nice strawman. Who said it would be free or easy? Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to maintain Python 2 anymore is delusional.

kstrauser 9y ago
At some point a CFO will ask why a company is spending $X to use ancient, unhireable versions of their tools when new, free, attractive versions exist. It will be explained - not exactly in these words - that it's basically because their senior devs refuse to learn new stuff. Senior management arguments will ensue. At the end, there will be a plan to save $X with One Simple Trick. Displaced senior devs will find themselves making nice paychecks at other shops with obsolete codebases, at least until those CFOs start to notice a funny line item in the engineering budget...
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Python 3 has been out for how long? None of this has happened yet. What is going to make 2.7 so unmaintainable? It’s there, it works and what is going to change that?
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    Python 2.7 is currently supported. It's not a great idea, but at least defensible, to still be developing against it today. But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it, I think it'll become very hard to explain why that's a good business decision. There are valid reasons for using 2.7 today. I think it's professional negligence to not at least be planning for the inevitable upgrade to the current version. Honestly, it's almost never as hard as you'd think. The most common hurdles are str/bytes incompatibility, and 3.x only reveals those problems where they already exist in 2.x (where the code is quite possibly not working as expected but silently passing wrong data without warning you).
    - hungerstrike 9y ago
      > But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it... Who even pays for a support contract for programming language that’s already done? That’s like saying JavaScript is unusable because of all of the different versions. Nobody has to pay anybody to use ES3 even though it’s largely obsolete.
  - guitarbill 9y ago
    Python 3 has been out since December 2008, so 9 years. It's easy to forget that Python 2 was supposed to have been deprecated in 2015, but that got pushed back until 2020. Personally, I don't feel like backporting security fixes forever.

Pffft. Nice strawman. Who said it would be free or easy? Expecting that everyone will just hop over Python 3 because one group of people doesn't want to maintain Python 2 anymore is delusional.

kstrauser 9y ago

At some point a CFO will ask why a company is spending $X to use ancient, unhireable versions of their tools when new, free, attractive versions exist. It will be explained - not exactly in these words - that it's basically because their senior devs refuse to learn new stuff. Senior management arguments will ensue. At the end, there will be a plan to save $X with One Simple Trick. Displaced senior devs will find themselves making nice paychecks at other shops with obsolete codebases, at least until those CFOs start to notice a funny line item in the engineering budget...

hungerstrike 9y ago
Python 3 has been out for how long? None of this has happened yet. What is going to make 2.7 so unmaintainable? It’s there, it works and what is going to change that?
- kstrauser 9y ago
  Python 2.7 is currently supported. It's not a great idea, but at least defensible, to still be developing against it today. But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it, I think it'll become very hard to explain why that's a good business decision. There are valid reasons for using 2.7 today. I think it's professional negligence to not at least be planning for the inevitable upgrade to the current version. Honestly, it's almost never as hard as you'd think. The most common hurdles are str/bytes incompatibility, and 3.x only reveals those problems where they already exist in 2.x (where the code is quite possibly not working as expected but silently passing wrong data without warning you).
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    > But the moment it becomes officially obsolete and shops have to justify paying special support contracts to maintain it... Who even pays for a support contract for programming language that’s already done? That’s like saying JavaScript is unusable because of all of the different versions. Nobody has to pay anybody to use ES3 even though it’s largely obsolete.
- guitarbill 9y ago
  Python 3 has been out since December 2008, so 9 years. It's easy to forget that Python 2 was supposed to have been deprecated in 2015, but that got pushed back until 2020. Personally, I don't feel like backporting security fixes forever.