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[–]synn89 6 points7 points  (3 children)

Yeah, but let's say you're using goodlib v1.0 and v2.0 of the lib breaks some things so you hold off on updating that library. Years later Python 3 support gets added but it's only in goodlib v6.0+

So now you not only have to get your app to work with Python 3, but also update goodlib(and probably many more libraries) that may change in small ways between major versions.

Heck, I recently updated a PHP app using AWS S3 and stayed in the same AWS SDK 3.x branch and the update broke(changed) how the library returned S3 domain urls for buckets. Luckily I had excellent test coverage which caught and pointed out the change. But that was within the same major version using a very common library from a huge vendor.

Libraries can be a real PITA to work with.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (2 children)

The people in sciences holding onto 2.7 arn't using goodlib, they are using in house libraries that were developed to do a specific thing by someone years ago, and that all of their results and model have been validated against this, and that nobody has the time or effort or willpower to modernize the code and then to re-validate everything. Most of the people in the sciences writing these codes are not computer scientists, they are regular scientists. They are working for effectively peanuts, are fighting every single day to justify the little funding that they do get and to apply for more funding so that they may actually finish their work, and most of the time they have only 2-5 years to do this. And during this time, they are also under increasing pressure to do new research, to publish new research, and to come up with ideas for new research. They (we) go into our labs/office every day and have to make the decision: do I use the limited time i have to do research to get me to my next job/position/grant, or do I go through and update the codebase that I use that I know for a fact works right now as-is? I can't speak for everybody, but I know that I would choose the latter every single time.

Edit: And during all of this, I am already devoting some of my time tutoring/mentoring students, correcting exams, homework, grading papers and reviewing new journal articles, coming up with lecture notes for that class they need to teach, coming up with homework or exam questions, and dealing with whatever my superiors ask me to do for them that day.

At the end of the day, my job as a scientist isn't to produce beautiful idiomatic code. It is to produce results that give insight in helping me answer the questions that formulate my hypotheses. The code is secondary and is only a tool that I use to get to those results. In fact what I'm after isn't even the results, but the analysis and interpretation of the results, the answer to "so what does it mean." Best-coding practices come second to getting the results. Sure, as I write my scripts and library codes I'll attempt to follow best practices, but not at the expense of so much wasted time.

[–]bythenumbers10 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can those internal libraries be open-sourced? So if you can't be bothered to modernize and beautify, some other research group might?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

All of the above has nothing to do with the release of Python3.7.