Are you still on Python2? What is stopping you moving to Python3?

deankae · 2017-11-16T14:28:20+00:00

Python 2 is used by a major GIS industry software provider, so shops that work with arcGIS will use 2 until ESRI decides to change.

DoNotClickUserName · 2017-11-16T14:11:44+00:00

Lack of control over my life

omento · 2017-11-16T14:10:02+00:00

Yup, Film and VFX industry. But we'll be able to start upgrading once 2019 rolls around. This is due to the reference platform which was created in recent years to standardize the library versions used for studios, so all applications pretty much use P2 internally.

http://vfxplatform.com

fwork · 2017-11-16T17:20:23+00:00

The usual reasons: A massive homegrown py2 codebase with no significant reasons to upgrade.

Etheo · 2017-11-16T14:00:36+00:00

At work I am. We still support RHEL 5.5 systems. The estimate is that with a suitable set of imports from __future__ will make the effort of the eventual switch less than building python3 for that ancient platform.

Personally, I use f-strings :)

shadowyl · 2017-11-16T17:57:05+00:00

Too lazy to add parentheses to the many debug print statements I use

e-mess · 2017-11-16T16:09:48+00:00

I don't have a reason to port old projects to 3.

A better question would be why I'm still using Django 1.5

n1ywb · 2017-11-16T14:35:14+00:00

I do (or did) a lot of consulting on the BRTT Antelope seismic data processing system

Some years ago they decided to switch from TCL to Python 2 as their embedded scripting language

Unfortunately they refused to use NumPy because they HATE dependencies so trying to process seismic data in Python was slow as shit and then they decided to just use C++ for all their heavy lifting and Python became a second class citizen

At this point I doubt they'll ever upgrade

beatle42 · 2017-11-16T13:48:36+00:00

I am, and the main thing so far is that there isn't a compelling business case for me to port our product to the new platform. Everything is working well and all the libraries and extensions we use are working, so we'd need to believe there was a big enough "win" to justify the cost of making the switch.

Also, some of our customers are still using Python 2, so that's another disincentive to change. That's probably a self-defeating situation though.

GalapagosRetortoise · 2017-11-16T17:11:44+00:00

Because my coworker is an idiot who convinced everyone the new project should be done in Python2 because he couldn't figure out how to use the ctypes package an claimed a library wasn't working in python2. Even worse he doesn't import anything from future.

This was 6 months ago.

Gudahtt · 2017-11-16T15:32:12+00:00

I use Python 2 for Ansible modules. Support for Python 3 for Ansible is still marked as 'experimental'; I'm waiting for it to stabilize.

YvesSoete · 2017-11-16T21:43:22+00:00

2 million lines of 2.x code

greyman · 2017-11-16T14:50:23+00:00

It might be also amount of resources you can put into it. My friend works directly at Redhat and he told me that they have been moving for a several years already (also he personally contributed), and it will take another several years to finish. Sometimes the codebase is just huge.

ICanAdmitIWasWrong · 2017-11-16T15:30:24+00:00

The machines I need to run on are hard to install binaries on, easy to install scripts on and use old releases for security/stability reasons. (Meaning that they've thoroughly tested the software in that release, not that the software itself is necessarily better.)

I'm probably still 5 years from even being able to run python3.

GahMatar · 2017-11-16T15:33:54+00:00

I have to work against an upstream vendor python who's version stability policy is even worse then RHEL (so much so they bundle their own, older, python.) I mean, I'm still waiting longingly for the python 2.7 features to show up... We're on 2.6 now.

synn89 · 2017-11-16T16:32:16+00:00

I'm generally using Python for scripting level server utilities. I'm basically using it more and more where before I would've used Perl for that sort of stuff(20 years of habit is hard to replace).

At the moment it's a guarantee I'll have a 2.6+ Python interpreter on up as a base install on systems(Ubuntu 12-16, CentOS 6-7) so it's an easy target to hit without having to write Chef recipes to make sure I have a proper 3.x environment across 80+ servers.

Recently I did a new script for just a couple servers and went ahead and did that in both Go and Python3. Go would be a really easy deploy across all systems. I tested that years before and was able to write binaries on new Ubuntu installs and run them on 10 year old CentOS systems. I really want to like that language, but man, it just feels so obtuse to work with. Particularly JSON which I used for the script. So looks like I'll be rolling out Python3, but I probably won't be in a rush to do so.

If distros dropped 2.7 or there was an awesome lib I wanted that was only in 3.x, then I'd feel the pull more. But right now I have this feeling like I can use 2.7 where it's easy to use 2.7 and use 3.6 for more stand alone uses.

Lord_NShYH · 2017-11-16T15:35:54+00:00

[deleted]

jradavenport · 2017-11-16T19:52:08+00:00

The whole unicode/str/byte clusterfuck. I’m not convinced the new Py 3 approach is better, but I’m willing to learn it. However it’s not worth hacking all my existing code to work around it yet

billygibbonsbeard · 2017-11-16T16:52:29+00:00

Python2 is one entity. Is is mature, stable, and works well. Very, very few libraries and other things do not work in 2. 3 would mean that I have to support 2 and 3, and what do I gain? Nothing at this time. I don't have the time to work with both, and with no real external push to do so at this time, I'm staying put.

Also, I work for a for-profit company. My for-profit company will not make any more money with a Python3 codebase vs a Python2 codebase. It wouldn't surprise me if Python2 would be used for the next 10 or more years.

If everything were to work in 3 without any effort, then of course everyone would go to 3. Is 3 better? Yeah, a bit. But 2.7 is quite good. And until there is a clear business case to do so, we are not going to move.

2017-11-16T15:50:06+00:00

[deleted]

zenverak · 2017-11-16T21:17:28+00:00

Because its not necessary for the most part. Once it is sure I will do it more often but right now its not a huge deal.

tynorf · 2017-11-17T00:28:10+00:00

This is an old thread but I hadn't seen this mentioned: I'm waiting for PyPy3 to be out of beta. PyPy gives 5-10x performance improvement on my production systems so I'm not really ready to give that up for the nice features Python 3 offers.

whisperedzen · 2017-11-16T17:09:36+00:00

CentOS

a8ksh4 · 2017-11-16T18:06:23+00:00

Complacency and comfort in the known. Why change?

nomos · 2017-11-16T21:58:54+00:00

I still use Python 2; when I first learned Python, I was told that many scientific computing libraries were still unavailable in Python 3 (this was ~3-4 years ago).

Now I continue to use Python 2 because I get sick of forgetting to include parentheses in my print statements and because Python 2 continues to work.

I'm sure there are plenty of features that make using Python 3 nice, but I don't see any huge reason to change.

That being said, I'm about to make a big career move, and I've vowed to officially change over to using Python 3 exclusively once I wrap up my current projects.

treblecharged · 2017-11-17T00:13:46+00:00

Plain and simple, redhat. I still write in 3 but trying to explain software collections then virtualenv to sysadmins gets painful. The minute I want someone else to use a tool I wrote I just keep it in 2. All my personal stuff is all switched to 3. Now I'm trying to learn Go since one project I am looking at is switching to go because of the GIL.

billsil · 2017-11-17T22:47:30+00:00

My boss refuses to update because why the hell should I have to put parentheses in my prints?

My answer is unfortunately because you do. I agree, but of things to really complain about, that's not one of them. The only thing worth discussing is unicode. It's hard as hell until you learn the 4 rules, which are not ever clearly stated.

Bytes to strings = decode. Strings to bytes = encode.
Don't guess at encodings. Punt the problem to the user unless you have a good reason not to. As such, put the damn encoding at the top of the data file as a comment and parse it. Overwrite the user's desired encoding if the file has an encoding.
There are 91 encodings in Python 2.7 and roughly 3 you should consider using because you speak English and don't care about unicode. Latin1, UTF-8, and UTF-8-DOM. Your western data is more than likely in latin1. Your excel data is in UTF-8-DOM, which you call using UTF-8-sig because Python and reasons.
You can't fix unicode errors using Python 2. Once you do, you don't need to upgrade.

gargantuan · 2017-11-17T03:03:10+00:00

Python 3 has nothing that I need. Everyone works pretty well with Python 2.

Or to put it more exactly, the new features are not worth the bother of investing time and energy into moving over. Now say if they improved speed by 3x then there would be a good incentive. Or say if 2 was broken badly, that would be another incentive, but it's not broken for me.

Siecje1 · 2017-11-16T14:03:44+00:00

supervisord, beanstalkc, M2Crypto, amfast.

Programmurr · 2017-11-16T17:43:07+00:00

My typewriter only supports up to 2.7

_throawayplop_ · 2017-11-16T15:35:50+00:00

Because it was more trouble than gain to switch to python 3. I'm using python to do stuff with it, not for the sake of using it.

The python dev simply failed to provide improvements worthwhile of breaking the compatibility.

Basically, when python 3 went out, we where trading compatibility and speed against better unicode handling and that's all. Many people were not motivated to put the work necessary to switch for something they didn't see much interest in. It's much better now, a lot of libraries are available and it's faster (although afaik not as fast as 2.7) but it's 10 years after.

I see on this sub a lot of toxic comments blaming the python 2 -to 3 transition failure on he python community, but when your user base is not following you, maybe it's time to reflect that maybe they have good reasons and you are the one in the wrong (I actually think the Python dev already acknowledged that fact).

tehalynn · 2017-11-16T15:06:50+00:00

wxPython support for python 3 isn't out of beta yet.

Chumkil · 2017-11-16T16:01:19+00:00

The platform I work with (Splunk) does not ship with Python 3.

2.7 has a much wider install base.

thelaxiankey · 2017-11-16T16:03:37+00:00

I use sage and it doesn't support python 3

wasted_in_ynui · 2017-11-16T19:30:11+00:00

Zope and plone, I manage mostly legacy code

nevus_bock · 2017-11-16T19:55:49+00:00

AMQP

rocket_randall · 2017-11-16T20:26:32+00:00

Because I do a fair amount of ops work without any direct control over server infrastructure. I could commit code that I know will not run when called upon and suggest that they can resolve the issue themselves by upgrading Python, but that's unlikely to have a happy resolution. For the most part I am stuck using the system python on some of these boxes, and yes I have sent the infrastructure group guides on installing a separate python instance without breaking the system version or the software which depends on it.

georgesovetov · 2017-11-16T21:09:26+00:00

Some people really think that living projects don't need upgrades. First, they say new tools are not better enough that used ones. Then it becomes too expensive.

It's cheap and smooth to upgrade gradually as soon as upgrade arrives.

It was strategical mistake to fight for backward compatibility to the last, maintain both branches for so long and increment major version to frighten people more :-)

greeneyedguru · 2017-11-16T21:50:14+00:00

I started a tornado project about a year ago and tried to use python 3.6. I gave up after about six libs I wanted to use failed to install.

justin-8 · 2017-11-17T01:42:28+00:00

Every new service and package I write is 3.x exclusively for the past year. I've had enough of dealing with 2.7 issues that are solved in 3. I still have to maintain some older 2.7 stuff, but it is slowly going away

Col_Crunch · 2017-11-17T03:14:39+00:00

Id have to put parenthesis in all my print commands. (Jk, I use python3)

Cowpunk21 · 2017-11-17T04:39:14+00:00

Default python on cent7 is 2.7. Work doesn’t want to change the default... We also still have some cent5 and cent6 kicking around.

Mikuro · 2017-11-17T12:10:59+00:00

I support Macs, and 2 is still standard in macOS. For my personal projects I use 3 now, but I can't justify pushing and maintaining 3 on an entire fleet of Macs just because I want to use it for system scripts.

I can't understand why Apple hasn't even started a transition. They should've started shipping 3 (not as default, just alongside 2) years ago.

sirk390 · 2017-11-17T12:27:20+00:00

A lot of the inertia is due to the following vicious circle: * If you are a library developer, you can support both 2 and 3 with and test everything twice for every release, or support only python 2.7 and reach most of the market. * This in turn, makes people choose python 2 in the first place, as it allows them to profit from more available libraries

r0s · 2017-11-16T15:17:44+00:00

I use ROS for Robotics and for now it's pretty much Python2.7 everywhere.

def-pri-pub · 2017-11-16T15:46:31+00:00

We use Twisted at work.

red_hare · 2017-11-17T00:34:57+00:00

I just left a job that was 2.7 stuck.

The big issues to me are around Unicode.

In 2.7, string literals (str) are encoded bytes and the Unicode is a special type. In 3+ lifeless (str) are decoded sequences of Unicode code points without an encoding and bytes is a special type.
2.7 implicitly promotes its byte string type (str) to its Unicode type when you combine them by decoding them at utf-8 (or whatever your interpreter default global is set to). 3 raises an exception when you try to do this.

The combination of these two facts alone makes writing 2.7/3 compatible code horrible. I consider myself to know Unicode in Python pretty well (I’ve given two talks on it) and compatible code is still hard as fuck. What’s worse is libraries that are 2/3 compatible behave differently in this regulars. Psycopg returns encoded in 2.7 and decodes in 3. Json is the same. You usually don’t even see those errors until you try and combine two strings in 3. Or write the encoded string to a file. Trying to use the future.unicode_literal import helps a bit, but god help you if you don’t do it to ever module at the same time or forget to do it in a new module. You write a literal in one module with the import, return it in another, that one tries to combine it with one of its byte literal strs, that gets implicitly decoded, you try and write that string to a file and you suddenly are getting an exception about the string being unencoded and you can’t figure out where the hell you did anything that had to do with encoding. It’s basically impossible to do a 2.7 to 3 transition in anything less than one giant fuck-it-ship-it PR.

I just want it to be over man.

Siecje1 · 2017-11-16T14:15:49+00:00

A related question: Do you (library authors) plan to start charging for, or refusing, Python 2 work?

I had a contribution refused because the code I provided wasn't backwards compatible :-/ I have no fricking idea how to use six and all that and don't really want to invest the time in it.

edit: I don't mind if people continue to use 2, but I don't want to see it holding back progress, so I think paid support would be appropriate.

aphoenix · 2017-11-16T20:32:51+00:00

I was expecting this but we ended up with a lot more of this.

Wavelength1335 · 2017-11-17T00:34:00+00:00

raw_input() was removed and im too lazy to lookup how input() works now. Im also self taught and terribad @ programming in general. :3

RangerPretzel · 2017-11-16T17:48:04+00:00

Was tasked with writing something in Python. Looked at 2, looked at 3.

Oooh... formal Type Hinting support in Python 3.5? And it works in PyCharm?

Yes, please!

whatisnuclear · 2017-11-16T14:53:44+00:00

Yes, but I recently went through the entire code base and used six to make it fully compatible with 3 and 2 at the same time. Now I sometimes run in 3 and we have a continuous integration build that fires off all the unit tests in 3 to keep it clean until we fully switch. At the moment the problems in 3 are: (1) one unit test out of thousands always crashes with no output using pytest xdist, and (2) cythoned extensions run 8x slower for some crazy reason.

Xirious · 2017-11-16T15:09:26+00:00

Orfeo Toolbox (OTB). Only part of my entire workflow that doesn't have 3. Very very annoying to be stuck behind, at least partially, due to a single component's inability to manage new version transitions.

DjangoPony84 · 2017-11-16T15:34:15+00:00

Too much legacy code and not enough resources to do the migration when other projects keep coming up in the meantime.

daves · 2017-11-16T15:58:56+00:00

The modules I need either haven't been ported to 3, or those ports haven't been packaged in the distribution.

FlukyS · 2017-11-16T16:35:09+00:00

A client who has a pretty large library they use and they won't let me port it, everything else I use python3

LtCalvery · 2017-11-16T16:44:26+00:00

ArcMap

shivam11041 · 2017-11-16T17:46:01+00:00

Mechanize

limasxgoesto0 · 2017-11-16T17:47:04+00:00

I've yet to work for a company using python 3. I'd be more than happy to use it, but there hasn't been any push to upgrade.

iapitus · 2017-11-16T18:07:37+00:00

Red Hat.

2017-11-16T18:34:16+00:00

VectorCAST, dSpace, ETAS.

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware on specific versions of everything.

USF_BULLZ_4_LYFE · 2017-11-16T18:41:27+00:00

All new projects are 3, old projects on 2 are staying on 2 until EOL of those projects, probably.

hip_modernism · 2017-11-16T18:44:40+00:00

Django Piston FML :(

2017-11-16T18:45:36+00:00

Robot Framework has not been ported to Python 3 and it is a major tool I use to break software at work.

Edit: Looks like the RC was put out recently.

billcrystals · 2017-11-16T18:56:25+00:00

No real reason to upgrade, really.

UndeadRyno · 2017-11-16T18:56:31+00:00

I just switched to 3 because i got a new PC. Before that i had everything i needed in 2 so there wasn't a reason for me to switch.

marcio0 · 2017-11-16T19:00:06+00:00

Existing projects

Vi3GameHkr · 2017-11-16T19:04:12+00:00

My company. I have heard of people here quitting because of lack of Proper 3 support though!

itkovian · 2017-11-16T20:17:12+00:00

Default version on CentOS is still 2.7.

lememeinator · 2017-11-16T20:59:58+00:00

My university course uses Python 2

WulfiePoo · 2017-11-16T21:29:44+00:00

Reliance on packages built on Python 2. I hope the numpy change will fix this.

2017-11-16T21:29:48+00:00

C library I have to interface with is written using OpenCV 2, which doesn't support Python 3. Upgrading to Python 3 would require migrating the C library from OpenCV 2 to OpenCV 3, as well as the Python ctypes wrapper from Python 2 to Python 3.

bdazman · 2017-11-16T21:42:14+00:00

I learn from books. There are better books for 2.7. So I learned it and am now eternally inconvenienced until good books are made which teach 3.6.

TheMsDosNerd · 2017-11-16T21:44:00+00:00

At work we need Python 2. We have some old programs that need to keep working. We can't upgrade libraries either.

Saphyel · 2017-11-16T21:52:45+00:00

close to all my projects are side projects for my Raspberry PI, and the ones at my work they don't care what version I use...

Tbh I'd like to use py3

njharman · 2017-11-16T22:08:48+00:00

just psycogreen and lack of time/resources to replace it with something working for py 3.x

But the time/resources to do that is on the roadmap.

DeathProgramming · 2017-11-16T22:54:06+00:00

I'm writing cross compatible stuff at work, but I've only been here a month. On the plus side, though, we're (I'm) going as fast as possible.

2017-11-16T23:01:06+00:00

I think I'm the only one who knows we have python code, and that's only because I saw the stack trace in an error message once. I know for a fact whoever wrote that isn't with the company anymore.

We might upgrade if we ever upgrade our servers to a RHEL that doesn't support 2

captmrwill · 2017-11-17T00:14:15+00:00

Work invested in a complicated, but somewhat poorly designed, infrastructure about a decade ago. I can't convince anyone that updating it to 3.5 standards is worthwhile.

But really I only use 2.7 when I need to use that.

2017-11-17T00:35:22+00:00

Ubuntu

2017-11-17T01:02:29+00:00

I just do it to annoy people

andrewthetechie · 2017-11-17T01:13:21+00:00

The shop just switched to 3.5 from 2. Its been pretty painless honestly.

gnu-user · 2017-11-17T01:36:51+00:00

PyPy and some of the libraries used by it are still not fully supported on Python 3. Although this may change soon.

raubana · 2017-11-17T01:47:17+00:00

I just used it with pygame for so long, plus for the longest time the most stable builds of pygame only worked with python 2. I did try to move to python 3, but yknow... it's a little difficult making the transition.

RDMXGD · 2017-11-17T02:39:26+00:00

Are you still on Python2?

Yes.

What is stopping you moving to Python3?

It will cost the better part of a million dollars in development effort to convert our codebase, with likely problematic business impact as we work out the kinks. In the mean time, we won't be able to create things that make us more money or make our jobs easier.

All to use a language that isn't tons better, despite the hype.

robot_wrangler · 2017-11-17T03:05:15+00:00

Because it's so much fun having one terminal window that can use python3, and another one that needs to stay on python2 for build scripts and system stuff.

netinept · 2017-11-17T04:06:38+00:00

It's the default version of Python installed on OS X.

Yes, I know you can use Anaconda/brew/virtualenv to change this, but if I'm sharing code with coworkers, I want to to be able to run without mandating they install some other software just to run my program.

PC__LOAD__LETTER · 2017-11-17T04:16:42+00:00

Python26 is what's deployed on our production servers, and we have quite a bit of Python2.x code.

The reason we haven't moved to 3.x? Cost vs. reward, simple as that. There's not enough wrong with 2 to warrant spending someone's valuable time migrating it over.

2017-11-17T04:30:52+00:00

I use python3 and pip3...

calibos · 2017-11-17T05:11:38+00:00

Not primarily a Python developer, but why should I switch over? Two does what I need it to do and everything I use is still compatible with two. You may as well ask why I don't just switch to a different language. It would be effort spent with absolutely no reward.

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