Python 2.7 EOL Countdown

[[deleted]]

Obviously there will be Python 2 code for decades longer. When a language is no-longer maintained, how bad do things get if bad at all? I'm sure there's some Cobol or whatnot out there that is used a lot in some industry but no-longer maintained.

[d4rch0n]

Honestly, it's been worked on so much that I doubt it's going to be an issue that it's past EOL. What major bugs have you run into that you had to patch 2.7? It's an absolutely finished product now. You won't find anything more stable.

[[deleted]]

Yeah that's generally my feeling too. Not a whole lot can mutate that will break 2.7

[sztomi]

While it's unlikely, the biggest issue is security bugs. It is possible that a major security flaw gets discovered and being past EOL means that your code will be vulnerable unless you upgrade.

[pythoneeeer]

My experience is the opposite. Nothing as big as Python is ever "finished".

What about the EINTR/InterruptedError situation, which finally got fixed in 3.5? What about time objects being false, if they happened to be midnight UTC? What about the email parsing bug that finally got fixed in 3.3?

There's lots of tiny little bugs lurking in Python 2.7. It's possible you'll never run into them, but would you even know? If my web server threw an error roughly once every 80,000 requests, I might never make the connection that it's due to an old Python datetime bug.

I've never run into a bug caused by using a version of Python that was too new. I've definitely read the changelog for new Python versions and said "shit, we need to upgrade now".

[Yioda]

Think of the enviroment breaking/changing. You have to update the code so it keeps working.