This should have been done in 2010. People will procrastinate 12 years if you give them a 12 years deadline.
Sunsetting Python 2
281–290 of 733 posts
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#282In 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…
This makes me wonder, are there any software frameworks and languages that are specifically built for multi decade use? Where they only release security updates and no breaking changes?
I would have said Java, but then they decided to shove modules down everyone's throat.
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#283In 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…
This makes me wonder, are there any software frameworks and languages that are specifically built for multi decade use? Where they only release security updates and no breaking changes?
"Built for", probably not. "That guarantees support for", some Windows releases and Microsoft stacks ended up doing more or less that, be it by accident or strategy. Probably some mainframe-related stuff too, being the only sort of thing around before the late '80s and possibly still in use.
There is also the case of Oracle, which defines support as "you can read our knowledge base and we will answer a phone before telling you it can't be done", meaning their support is literally for life (of the company). And they still manage to screw it up by deleting old KM articles...
Everything else in IT goes towards shorter and shorter support windows, because the field is always in flux and change (or rather churn) accelerates every year.
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
You couldn't switch to Python 3 until the middle part of this decade unless the stars aligned with your dependencies, the library support wasn't there. And the first releases of Python 3 were glorified betas, the first "usable" version of Python 3 is often considered to be version 3.3 released in 2012.
But you could easily write Python 3 compatible code so that upgrading once your dependacies were ready was easy. You also could have contributed to your dependancies to help them become Python 3 compatible.
Quick: run a shell command, split up the reply by line, run a regex on each line, and save the results to a yaml file— now, does what you wrote work correctly on both Python 2.7 and Python 3.3+? Yeah that's what I thought.
It's still hard to get bilingual Python correct today, and it was considerably harder before 3.3.
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#285And now remind yourself that there are self driving cars out there and autonomous digging equipment that is based on ROS, which doesn't have any plan or intent to move to python 3. Fun stuff...
Well the ROS wiki says otherwise: http://wiki.ros.org/UsingPython3
Yeah but the general consensus for the core stuff seems to be "we'll do that with 2.0", which at this point seems to
materialize since forever aka. vaporware...
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
This x 1000. “The free libraries we chose to depend upon haven’t migrated.” Do you have programmers? “Of course.” Put them to work. “We have other priorities.” Well then. Your choice, your outcome.
This attitude is ridiculous. I'm supposed to go and tell all the various projects that I depend on that they have to change their upgrade timescales to suit mine? Even if I had enough time to help them all meet that kind of timescale, why would they agree to fit their changes into my required deadline? Maintainers are under a lot of pressure. Having users come along and say "we'll add 50 developers to your project if…
You fork the library. You fix the incompatibility issues. You issue PRs back to the mainline to help them adopt the same fixes. At some point in the future you can switch back to the main repo if they've migrated, or you can consider that library abandoned and continue to maintain your own or find an alternate.
At no point do you have to wait on anyone else, you choose to.
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#287Python 2 to 3 (at least by 3.3 or so) was one of the easiest transitions I've ever done. There's a library ("six") to help, and in almost all cases you can write 2-and-3 compatible code, which means you can go piece-by-piece. (Unless your manager makes drive-by commits of py2-only code, months after you all agreed that all new code should be py3-compatible, and then leaves town for a multi-week vacation...) Dependenc…
> python 2 to 3 (at least by 3.3 or so) was one of the easiest transitions I've ever done. Good for you. Some of us had code bases of considerable size and complexity though. The fact is that for working software on the python platform, this upgrade represented work that had to be done that for a legacy app that was still chugging... little benefit. If you already coded around the python 2 limitations for Unicode eg,…
I found some Unicode bugs in porting—and I get continued free security updates. Seems fair to me, and certainly not “no benefit”. I can keep on 2.7 as long as I like; nobody’s forcing me to port. Compare the situation with Java!
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#288On the topic of large companies still using Python 2, I would love to hear about Splunk's upgrade plans. They have the following[1] on their SDK page about upgrading, but my understanding is their entire platform is still on Python 2.
I've upgraded a number of projects at my work to Python 3 this year, but nothing that 2-3 developers couldn't do in a few weeks. Can only imagine the headache of migrating something the size of Splunk.
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#289Python 2 to 3 (at least by 3.3 or so) was one of the easiest transitions I've ever done. There's a library ("six") to help, and in almost all cases you can write 2-and-3 compatible code, which means you can go piece-by-piece. (Unless your manager makes drive-by commits of py2-only code, months after you all agreed that all new code should be py3-compatible, and then leaves town for a multi-week vacation...) Dependenc…
(Unless your manager makes drive-by commits of py2-only code, months after you all agreed that all new code should be py3-compatible, and then leaves town for a multi-week vacation...)
That seems like a very specific example...
Re: Sunsetting Python 2
#290What surprises me about this is that the documentation for Python 2 does not explicitly say that the language version is about to be unsupported, see e.g. https://docs.python.org/2/library/zipfile.html Contrast this with the Postgres website, which tells me I'm browsing old docs (because Google still offers old links), see e.g. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/tutorial-window.html Are there plans to add a banner t…
Django has a similar banner at the top if you (perhaps via Google) get to a page about a feature in a deprecated version. So it's not like this is uncommon in the Python world. Hopefully they get that fixed soon.