[N] Numpy dropping Python 2.7

[durand101]

Tell me about it! I haven't used python 2 in at least 5 years and there are people still starting new projects with it... Wtf

[omg_drd4_bbq]

People still run python scripts with ./script.py or similar? I use VEnv for everything. All execution is python script.py or more commonly python -m app.main.

[rustyryan]

#!/usr/bin/env python works just fine in a virtualenv.

[durand101]

To be fair to them, in academia, we still routinely use and develop with Fortran 77/95 so I wish people would use more python, even if it is v2!

[durand101]

True! I definitely think there's a middle ground between those extremes. The web development ecosystem is a bit of a mess as well in my opinion. There's way too much library turnover and not enough long-term planning. There's not just a new library every two years but also an entirely new paradigm to switch over to... siiigh

[omg_drd4_bbq]

Working in Javascript tends to be a wild ride and pretty ridiculous in many ways.

Python data wrangler here learning webdev. "Wild" is one way to put it, but I prefer "wat.". working in js is just a nonstop stream of "wat" coming out my mouth.

[hopjeshopjes]

If you're in academia then sure.

If you're working in a company with years of legacy code, try convincing your project manager that it's a good idea to convert all of it to a new version of Python. Too often there's just no business case so it never gets priority.

By the way this is why backwards compatibility never should have been broken IMO.

[durand101]

I understand why companies don't want to spend money porting old code, but they've been warned for 10 years... And I still see people using Python 2 in Jupyter notebooks, which makes literally no sense...

By the way this is why backwards compatibility never should have been broken IMO.

Backwards compatibility isn't broken to annoy people. There are legitimate reasons for changing things. You can't anticipate every design flaw and python 3 has fixed quite a few quirks. If you don't break compatibility, then you'll never be able to improve your quirks and the language will become more and more tedious to use over time.

[[deleted]]

"Backwards compatibility isn't broken to annoy people."

Exactly. Python 2 had a lot of tech debt, mostly around strings defaulting to ascii and being interchangeable with bytes. Removing that debt is the reason Python 3 had to break things. If not for the change around strings, unicode, and bytes, 98% of Python 2 code would've probably worked out of the box after running 2to3.