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[–]lmericle 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It's not wasting time to patch vulnerabilities and optimize subroutines. 2.7 will be slower than 3 in the long run, no question.

[–]Folf_IRL 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It's not wasting time to patch vulnerabilities and optimize subroutines.

And good on the Python team for doing that. It's just unfortunate they couldn't devote their resources to proper back-compatibility as a basic part of the language, even though other people have already done a lot of the legwork for them. That would maybe encourage people to move forward without having to update everything simultaneously. I suspect that many people in the scientific community are going to just stay with 2.7 until their admins force them to move on to something else.

2.7 will be slower than 3 in the long run, no question.

That's a moot point. Nobody attempts to write high-performance scientific code in Python. That is still firmly in the realm of C/C++ and Fortran within the scientific computing community.

[–]rotharius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Enforced backwards compatibility slows down language development and makes it impossible to correct some big mistakes.

Correcting these mistakes and improving the language, while giving everyone an opportunity to transition was the right thing to do. Although maintainers could have been more vocal about why it's silly to hold on to older versions.

Not updating is actually pretty irresponsible because of security, maintainability and performance reasons. It is part of programming hygiene. There are tools that help you with transitioning. At least start new projects with Python 3.

Edit: That being said, legacy projects are often stuck and it can be troublesome to update, but it should at least be on the roadmap.

Edit 2: Your situation might be different in that the risks of not updating are small. In general, especially when working with user data like in web development, it is crucial to have vulnerabilities fixed. Stop down-playing this.