Why I'm Making Python 2.8

You can still download the operating system for an Amiga, yet the Amiga is obsolete (despite diehards still using 31 year old computers).

Python 2 is no longer being actively developed. It receives bug fixes, and even those are scheduled to stop before too much longer. The fact that people are using Python 2 means that it's not dead, but that doesn't mean it isn't obsolete.

Think of it this way. You need a library to solve some problem, and you find one on Github. The project hasn't received any major updates in 3 years. Some people have submitted pull requests, and a few of them have even been merged, but it's clear that the maintainers are focused on other projects these days. Is that an indication that this project is simply mature and no further work is required? Or could it indicate that the maintainers want to work on other things, and this is not a priority for them any longer?

Saying that Python 2 is obsolete isn't an insult. Python 2 is popular, and loved by many, many people. It has been adopted as a teaching language by many schools, has inspired multitudes of people to learn to code, and has achieved prominence in data science, machine learning, and scientific computing. It also happens to be at the end of its lifecycle, development has moved on to Python 3, and the developers don't have much interest in maintaining Python 2 any longer.

That doesn't diminish the accomplishments of Python 2 or the people who love it. However, it does mean that the label fits.

FWIW, I thought it was appropriate and I had the same xkcd cartoon in mind as I was reading the comments. Someone else beat me to it.

> If they had have called Python 3.0 v2.9 instead everyone would have been clear they had to migrate. [...] The reason this happend (and is still happening) are human not technical.

You know, as a strong proponent of Python 3.* (it's a significantly better Python), I started to write a withering critique of your statements here (and I do strongly disagree about naming it Python v2.9). But then I started actually looking at the evidence.

For example, when you go to download Python at the python.org website, you're still presented with a choice between Python 2 and Python 3 side-by-side, looking for all purposes like equivalent choices (Python 2 should be much less prominent and toward the bottom and/or the download button should be much smaller than the Python 3 download button)[0].

And then, when you follow the link for "Wondering which version to use?", you get a full page worth of hemming and hawing, and cost-benefit analyses and so on[1]. In fact, they should be saying something like:

    Always use Python 3 unless you have a strong reason to do otherwise.
    This typically only applies to people who have large legacy code 
    bases and are for some reason unable to upgrade, or else need a special 
    legacy library only available in Python 2 (most libraries are 
    available in Python 3)."

So wow, having read the official python.org statements on the Python 2 vs 3 issue, I'm pretty appalled. No wonder some people who are relatively new to Python are confused or surprised. I'm on Debian or Ubuntu mostly and so download Python via package manager or PPA, or build from source. So I had no idea.

It's also been a huge mistake for GVR to have allowed so many new and attractive features to be backported to Python 2.7. It's taken away a significant amount of incentive for people to make the move. Python 2.* should have been bugfixes only for a long, long time now.

That said, if you're in charge of significant amount of Python code for a company and you've not seen for years that Python 2 is a deadend, you've either been engaging in wishful thinking or oblivious to what's happening in the Python community.

0. https://python.org/downloads/

1. https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

Reading a thread from the last time something like that was proposed (although the only change in that proposal was that 2.8 would, on Windows, use the C runtime from a more recent MSVC compiler), I found a relevant argument (https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2013-November/1...) against this "Python 2.8" idea:

What if more than one person did that? (paraphrasing Raymond Chen's "What if two programs did this?")

There can be only one official Python 2.8, but since it will never exist (see PEP 404), there can be many unofficial mutually incompatible "Python" 2.8 implementations. Therefore, calling it "Python 2.8" is a bad idea.

> write so well

I disagree. He uses complicated words where simple ones would do and other words that are redundant. For example, read his sentence after removing "typically, in fact,". It conveys the same meaning but sounds less pretentious.