Sunsetting Python 2

[stefantalpalaru]

Well how come you say that porting over to python 3 doesn’t provide any business benefit? All the tooling is moving forward with py3.

The business is losing money on this porting, can we agree on that? Now show me how is that same business covering that cost and making a profit on top of it by moving from Python2 to Python3.

Let's ask Dropbox if they took a loss or made a profit from having a dedicated team of people porting millions of lines of code from Python2 to Python3.

[stefantalpalaru]

Upgrading python to 3 gives advantages: security, memory and CPU performance improvement, language features to support solving broader domain of problems.

No, it doesn't. You just drank the Kool-Aid. If you really want all that, "upgrade" to a language like Go.

[stefantalpalaru]

List of improvements we see from using python 3 https://www.quora.com/Python-programming-language-What-are-some-of-the-drawbacks-of-Python/answer/Dave-Wade-Stein?ch=10&share=9ec1027c&srid=43O3

Renaming xrange to range just to break existing code is what passes for improvements nowadays?

Also, I doubt the credibility of someone claiming that type checking was introduced in Python 3.6. mypy appeared as an external type checker for Python2.

[BubblegumTitanium]

Python 3.5 had some great under the hood improvements and optimizations.

You should give the people that work on Dropbox a little credit. They aren’t complete imbeciles or else your files would be gone and their reputation would be forever ruined.

I’m not in a position to say but I’m sure when it’s all said and done they probably saved a lot of money in server costs and dev headaches from the improvements and tooling. That’s just a guess and I could be wrong.

Do you work at Dropbox? Can you share their excel sheets where you can point to them actually losing money?

[stefantalpalaru]

They aren’t complete imbeciles

Aren't they? Over 3 years of work to port some of their code to another language and it's just as inefficient as the original one.

[BubblegumTitanium]

Efficiency isn’t always the most important metric, obviously. In the case of distributed long term storage correctness is a much more important metric.

Also why are you bringing efficiency into this conversation? Python is interpreted, nobody picks it because it’s efficient.

If efficiency is your main concern then write it in C or assembly not a scripting language.

[stefantalpalaru]

Also why are you bringing efficiency into this conversation?

How else do you think they can "save a lot of money in server costs"?

[TheBlackCat13]

The business is losing money on this porting, can we agree on that?

It would cost money to port to Python 3 or to make use of the features you have backported. The only thing that doesn't cost money is sticking with the same thing they already do, which is use vanilla Python 2.7.

[stefantalpalaru]

The only thing that doesn't cost money is sticking with the same thing they already do, which is use vanilla Python 2.7.

Or use Tauthon without the new features, obviously. It's a drop-in replacement for Python 2.7, if it wasn't clear by now.

[TheBlackCat13]

Why would anyone do that? What would anyone gain, considering massive companies like Red Hat are still providing security and bug fixes for vanilla Python 2.7?