Live data from Hacker News

Sunsetting Python 2

python.org

111–120 of 733 posts

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#111
We are volunteers who make and take care of a Python2 fork with backwards-compatible Python3 features. That means we will keep on improving it without breaking your code base or forcing you to hire the language creator and spend more than 3 years porting your code to Python3, with no actual business benefits.

https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#113

Great stuff. But what about alternative python interpreters that have been lagging behind? Jython is 2.7.1 and IronPython is 2.7.9

IronPython is a dead project at this point…

Well, he's... he's, ah... probably pining for the fjords.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#115
post #7

Some shared hosting providers are still offering Python 2.6 as their main offering.[1] Optionally, there's Python 3.2, probably the worst 3.x version. [1] https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/what-software-and-pro...

PHP-style shared hosting is not where Python users are. The shared-hosting story for Python has always been pretty bad, with rare exceptions (webfaction, before godaddy swallowed it). Python users are overwhelmingly on VPS and PaaS, where versions can be easily upgraded. Any PaaS provider without Python 3.6+ at this point is not worth paying for.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#116
post #23
post #7

Some shared hosting providers are still offering Python 2.6 as their main offering.[1] Optionally, there's Python 3.2, probably the worst 3.x version. [1] https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/what-software-and-pro...

As they are on CentOS 6 it would be impractical to switch to another version as default as Python is used by the system, however they do have 2.7 installed.

With Software Collections[1], using more recent Python versions on CentOS 6 is trivial. Bad excuse.

[1]: https://softwarecollections.org/

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#117

One missing question: Q) I like Python 2. Can I take over Python 2 maintenence? A) NO. Try it and we'll sue you.

More like Q) I like Python 2. Can I take over Python 2 maintenence? A) Sure. Just don't pretend to be us; call your fork something other than Python 2

Pythoff.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#118
post #62

In 2015, there was no way I could have moved to Python 3. There were too many libraries I depended on that hadn't ported yet. In 2019, I feel pretty confident about using Python 3, having used it exclusively for about 18 months now. For my personal use case at least, this timeline worked out well for me. Hopefully it works out for most everyone. I can't imagine they made this decision without at least some data backi…

Personal use can be quite different to business use cases. For many companies the conversion can be quite horrific, they might be quite happy to pay for support for older versions.

There are companies offering extended support beyond EOL for version 2.

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone like python2 so much better than python3 that they would want to fork it into its own language? The two languages are already incredibly similar and python3 has a much larger active community.

It's having to write the parenthesis after print. No one wants that and it's been by far the largest complaint the community has about python3.

> No one wants that

Why would you write a statement that is so demonstrably false?

Re: Sunsetting Python 2

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is having a place to organise. The Python foundation is threatening to sue anyone continuing something called Python 2, or even a similar name. Finding volunteers who are willing to get sued to work on Python will be hard.

Continuing a fork under the original name would be confusing to everyone and bad manners, aside from infringing the trademark. But nobody is stopping people from organising around a fork called "Omphalos - a Python 2 fork" or whatever

Somebody has done just that already, it’s easily googleable. Nobody really cares though - why would you purposefully tie yourself to an objectively-inferior featureset, full of problems that have already been solved in py3? Because you can’t bear the use of parentheses for print, really?
Post reply on HN