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Here's one of the things that honestly surprised me about the Python 2 -> 3 debacle. I witnessed people in 2020 starting new Python projects and deliberately ch

Here's one of the things that honestly surprised me about the Python 2 -> 3 debacle. I witnessed people in 2020 starting new Python projects and deliberately choosing Python 2. For no real reason. They were fully aware that Python 3 existed, but they just sort of arbitrarily chose to use Python 2. This was about 12 years after Python 3 was originally released, it was after Python 2 was sunset, and none of the dependencies of these projects required Python 2. It honestly makes me feel a little nihilistic about versioning and upgrades. I know there were many legitimate technical challenges for many people in moving from Python 2 to 3. But I now feel that versioning is always going to be bumpy, regardless of the technical issues, because a substantial number of users will make strange decisions.

hulitu 4y ago
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
chucksmash 4y ago
It was not for no reason. It's that people knew Python 2, whereas for many what they knew about Python 3 was: - I heard it is a lot of work to switch over (must be pretty different!). - Learning more about it is on my todo list, but I haven't had a chance to get around to it yet. That's not to excuse their decisionmaking from a do-the-right-thing standpoint, because they weren't doing right by their clients, but I feel it's totally understandable. I remember speaking to conscientious engineers a few years before that who only knew a smattering of Python from the 2.7 era and were apprenhensive about starting a new project in 3.x. Sometimes you just have to hold people's hands a little. Maybe not a "good" reason, but so it goes.