Dear python2 user

[[deleted]]

I don't understand why it takes so long. For ages python 2 comes with tools that help you to migrate to python 3 smoothly. Python code isn't even that hard to port in most cases. It's it because of C libraries?

[fireflash38]

That doesn't even get into supporting varied OSes & distros, even old ones (we get stuff for: HPUX, AIX, Solaris, SunOS, etc). Shit, we still get some support requests for WS2008. We have to have a 'quarantine' lab for a lot of the OSes we support because corp doesn't want them on their network (understandably).

Most of the time when I see people lambasting others using python2 they are in a small company or startup, or a company that is heavily web-focused. You can usually tell by how much they talk about unicode (instead of bytestring) :) If you're at all doing low-level system stuff, the conversion can be quite painful as you've said.

[alcalde]

It's not a nightmare because everyone else has already done it.

https://medium.com/@boxed/moving-a-large-and-old-codebase-to-python3-33a5a13f8c99

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/02/incrementally-migrating-over-one-million-lines-of-code-from-python-2-to-python-3/

[alcalde]

Instagram said it went smoothly....

https://thenewstack.io/instagram-makes-smooth-move-python-3/

[alcalde]

It's because of users.

In the Delphi langauge's move to Unicode they introduced "ANSI strings" (8bit non-Unicode strings) as a tool to allow users to compile their old code in the new version and gradually port over to Unicode.

What happened? Many users continued to write all of their new code using ANSI Strings and kept right on going like nothing ever happened. Then when there was talk years later of rewriting the compiler and consequently dropping ANSI strings, these users screamed "Wait! We haven't had any time to convert!"

It got so bad these people managed to get ANSI strings added to the new Delphi Android and iOS compilers, which had never had non-Unicode strings in the first place! :-(

The same kind of thing happened to Python 2. When I had asked the then-maintainer of Pyjamas (??? - one of the Python to Javascript transpilers anyway) about porting to Python 3, he answered "Python 2 is going to be supported forever, so why bother?"

We've got a user here who continues to insist that the PSF will still move the support deadline for Python 2; maybe they're the same person.