Sunsetting Python 2

In what way is "we are no longer going to provide any of our volunteer time to support Python2" even _vaguely_ able to be characterised as "grabbing it out of the hands of people still using it"???

Here: https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/2.7

Join the other 11.5k people who've forked it on Github, and an unknown number of people who've cloned it without playing Github's high-school popularity contest...

Nobody is ever going to take anything Python2 related away from you.

There's a lot of talk here about "arrogance", all from people upset that some other people have decided not to do any _more_ free volunteer work on a thing they've been trying to get people to upgrade from for 3/6/12 years depending on how you count it. Those people complaining about "arrogance" are putting words into the mouths of the people who've done so much free work for them over th=e last 20 years, accusing them of saying "fuck you" and of "grabbing things out of the hands of people" and of "cannibalising" the code they wrote 15-20 years ago while providing newer better code (which happens to not suit some people who're not prepared for whatever reason to update their own code).

GvR is _not_ the one seeming arrogant in this thread...

(And didn't the last line in my comment you replied to make it abundantly clear I knew exactly what arrogance the OP was incorrectly claiming, and what the actual arrogance on display was?)

> It's also arrogant to grab Python 2 out of the hands of people still using it and flush it down the toilet.

No one is doing that. Python 2 is available, open-source software. The Python core team discontinuing development isn't grabbing it out of anyone's hands. Open source projects whose core teams have discontinued them in favor of an incompatible (either technologically or by licensing) alternative, or abandoned them altogether (or just not maintained them in a way that pleased the community), have often had maintenance picked up by alternative maintainers, who have often had to use alternative names for the independent continuation project. Nothing is taken out of anyone's hands by this.

> If Python 3 could run Python 2 code (even at just the granularity of modules) then all of this mess could have been avoided.

And we all saw how well starting with that goal worked for Perl 6.

> But I do find the attitude of "Hey, F. U." to those of us who want to keep using Python 2 to be pretty arrogant.

No one has that attitude (except maybe employers, but that's more about a desire to continue to get paid for using Python 2 than merely to continue to use it.) You are perfectly free to continue using Python 2 until the Earth is swallowed up by the Sun and no one will stop you, or even really care.

Arguably, your reference upthread to the Perl5/6 problems makes it a more than reasonable request that the trademark "Python" doesn't get confused in the minds of users by awkwardly referring to 2 different and incompatible languages, however tightly they were related a decade ago.

Perhaps you could argue that the Python3 language could have changed it's name and "left" the trademark and reputation behind for some other random people to take over. But a stronger argument would be that the reputation Python has earned over the last two decades "belongs" to the ongoing team who built and supported it for way longer as version 2.X than they needed to and who've now been releasing it as V3 for over a decade.

If "people are still using" Python2, nobody is going to stop them. Nobody it deleting all the copies of the source code to Python2.7 or revoking any of the rights the granted when it was released:

"PSF hereby grants Licensee a nonexclusive, royalty-free, world-wide license to reproduce, analyze, test, perform and/or display publicly, prepare derivative works, distribute, and otherwise use Python alone or in any derivative version" (from: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/2.7/LICENSE )

It you're uptight because the PSF owns and protects the trademark to the name "Python" where used in relation to a programming language _that they wrote and gave away and granted you extensive rights to do whatever you damn well please with their source code_ - that's a totally unreasonable expectation on your part.

Spend two decades building your own reputation for intelligent and responsive language design and stewardship, then walk away from all that reputation by allowing random people to piggyback off it, then get back to me and tell me how that's actually how shot should work... Guido and his team have put the hard yards in. They've given you pretty much free reign to do whatever you like with their source code. They are not only under no obligation to allow you to call what you do with that "Python", but they arguably have a responsibility to ensure that people who expect a historical level of stewardship and "benevolent dictatorship" of the language called "Python" are not mislead by people other than them using that name to continue to promote old and discarded technology and design decisions with any assumption that those new people deserve any of the historical reputation that "Python" implies.

Get over the "Wah! I can't use the name Python! I'm being oppressed!!!" childishness. I, for one, do not want _you_ specifically, and people like you in general, to fraudulently trade in the reputation that the Python trademark would bestow on your work if you were allowed to call it "Python".

> You're blaming people who probably don't get to call the shots.

No one is doing that.

OTOH, it's not PSFs job to protect developers from bad management.

Yep, someone has to pay in one way or another like Red Hat customers on 7, but to say Python has near the life cycle of COBOL is just disingenuous. Old COBOL still runs, but Python 2 programs will not. It really shows what the achievement languages like COBOL, RPG, and Fortran are in terms of longevity and migration.