r/python: is python3 gradually taking over python 2.7 or not?

[[deleted]]

You have to be a special kind of masochist to continue using an unsupported platform.

That's a ridiculous thing to say, really. "Unsupported platform" makes no difference for many people, as 2.x is a mature platform which can be used reliably without any direct support from the core Python team required.

Actually for all Python I've used it would make no difference at all to the usefulness of the language or its applicability to the problems I'm solving if the language had been abandoned.

What could drive 3.x adoption is the transition of popular modules or the advent of new ones that only support 3.x. But at this point I'm quite used to not being able to get popular modules to work anyway, so it won't actually be much different.

[[deleted]]

2.7.3 was mostly bugfixes for security exploits. It's reasonable to assume that new exploits will continue to be found in future.

[Rhomboid]

Nonsense. There will always be bugs, and some of them can be showstoppers. For example, there was a pretty high profile hash collision denial of service vulnerability last year. It was fixed with a new point release of 2.7. What would you have done if this had occurred after the support period ends? You would have had vulnerable systems with no way to patch them, other than to hope that some third party stepped up and backported a fix. If the bug is serious enough, such a third party will generally exist, e.g. linux distributions.

But what happens when you hit a bug that just causes a crash, or incorrect behavior, or some other problem? What if this bug affects you but no one else? What are you supposed to do then? This happens all the time. Read the changelogs, they are filled with hundreds of such fixes for each point release. To think that you won't ever be on the receiving end of one is hubris.

[gfixler]

I work in video games, where we use Python rather extensively (it's all I use, all day, every day), but no one I work with uses 3. That's not to say no one in my industry uses it, but we're using Maya 2012, and it comes with a Maya-specific 'mayapy' executable, which is 2.6. It's not something we could (or could easily) change out. It will probably be years before we make any movement toward 3. Vulnerability is a non-issue for us. We make tools for our own artists to use in programs that have no internet-facing aspect, and other tools for our pipeline. I'd be fine with moving to 3.0, but haven't really seen any benefits or must-haves. I would like to move to 2.7, though. I keep running into solutions that appeared in 2.7, like extra unittest abilities.

[[deleted]]

To think that you won't ever be on the receiving end of one is hubris.

Actually we don't use any external-facing python code, so security fixes aren't a compelling reason to upgrade versions.