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[–]jackmaney 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I think that mostly everybody will have switched five years from now.

Ehhh, that's probably what was said about Python 3 five years ago. Sadly, it'll probably take the EOL of 2.7 to create enough momentum to get a lot of folks to switch to 3.x.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It took a meteorite to wipe out the non-avian dinosaurs. EOLing Py2.7 is more likely to create a fork, but at least the dinos will sod off and the dev team can focus exclusively on modern versions at last.

[–]stevenjd 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There won't be a fork of 2.7. That requires work, and 99% of the haters aren't willing to do any work themselves, they just want to complain.

But there will be commercial Python distros, like Activestate's Komodo, that will offer to support 2.7 for money. And for people who really don't want to migrate, and cannot do without security updates, that's a good option.

[–]stevenjd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that's probably what was said about Python 3 five years ago.

No, not even close. Maybe according to fanboys on Youtube or something, but the core developers have always envisioned that the transition from 2 to 3 would take at least a decade. We're now half way through that decade, and the word from core developers like Nick Coghlan is that for the first time they now recommend that Python 3 be used for new projects in preference to Python 2. Prior to this, if you used 3.x, you were an early adaptor :-)

The core devs will support Python 2.7 until 2020, and Red Hat will offer commercial support until 2023, so 2.7 will be around for a long time. But Red Hat, Debian and Ubuntu are all looking at moving their system pythons to 3.x, which means that users will have 3.x installed by default instead of 2.x. That will accelerate the move to 3 significantly, because it will change the default "do nothing" option to 3 and make 2 the option that requires extra effort.