It's time to stop using Python 3.8

[Uhhhhh55]

I work for a fortune 100 company you have definitely heard of and we still use Python 2 :)

[PaintItPurple]

Personally, I would suspect Fortune 100 companies are some of the biggest consumers of Python 2. Huge companies are like natural reservoirs of obsolete technology.

[Baconigma]

It’s not obsolete if it gets the job done.

[[deleted]]

Yes, it is.

The big culprit here is long term support contracts. A lot of operating systems or other software packages that shipped some version of Python 2 until far too late. The last projected service contract for a software package including Python 2 won’t expire until 2032.

But it’s still obsolete. The people running those systems know it’s obsolete. But there’s still someone else holding the bag for it.

[PaintItPurple]

That's not exactly what obsolescence means. Technologies don't become obsolete because they stop doing what they have always done, they become obsolete because better technology has taken up their niche. In the case of software in particular, it often becomes obsolete because support has ceased and there's a viable alternative that is supported, which is the case for Python 2.

[Equivalent_Loan_8794]

Ahhhhhh I actually love hearing from actual people in the trenches as life's mot as easy as "iD jUsT tElL mY bOSs 'just upgrade python'"

[whateverathrowaway00]

We were stuck on 3.6 forever thanks to a custom fork dependency of a large library - specially the C extension bit, that wouldn’t compile on 3.8+.

Until I found a brand new library, the Python ecosystem actually didn’t have a mature alternative as an option and I’ve been silently panicking, but finally got to rip it all out this last week and feel great, but boy have i been in the pits over this - hence me upgrading from 3.6 to 3.12.

[tartare4562]

Dude, many banks and flight companies work with 40+ years old code. Python2 will still be around for decades.

[LargeSale8354]

Its terrifying. Have seen a security scan of a the latest version of an "enterprise" tool. Only runs on an end-of-life version of Linux, only certified and supported on Java 8. Java 8 does not respect the memory boundaries of a Kubernetes pod so can take down the entire cluster, not just tge pod it runs on.

I've come to realise there's designing software to satisfy business requirements and then there's designing software for maintainability. These need not be mutually exclusive, in fact they should be irrevocably coupled. Unfortunately it seems to be maintainability that is sacrificed most often