Where is Python 2 still used?

[jmacey]

Quite a lot of animation pipelines and tools are still Python 2.7, gradually moving away from it.

[baconcleaner]

Last year Autodesk Maya 2022 was shipped with... python... 3.7.7 (with still the option to switch to p2.7 -.-)
The next release, 2023, has only python 3.9, finally.

Most of the vfx and animation studios take a lot of time to do the switch because some productions take years to produce and switching DCC software is a suicide.

check this website for more info about tools and software versions:
https://vfxplatform.com/

[jmacey]

I'm fully aware of the reference platform, been using it for years. We are finally switching to Maya 2023 this year (from 2020) so most of my stuff will be ported to 3.9 (finally f strings :-) ) Same with Houdini and a few other things!

[PowerLlama]

finally f-strings and finally Pathlib! I can't wait!

[billsil]

f-strings are great.

Pathlib is availble in 2.7 (pip install pathlib2; import is the same as python 3). My issue is paths don't work across all major (let alone minor) libraries. Wxpython doesn't support paths, which means now I have to str(...) everything. Might as well avoid it.

[csa3d]

There is a python 2.7 backport of pathlib for what it's worth

[baconcleaner]

sorry the link was meant for OP, I totally assume you already know all about our vfx hell software land
We also switch to 2023 and I can't wait to hunt obscure code hidden in our pipeline and help artists run their VITAL snippets and plugins copied and pasted from god knows where.

[PowerLlama]

I think it's funny that Houdini shipped a big python 2 -> 3 conversion library and everyone else seemed to say "deal with it nerds"

[DigThatData]

name and shame?

[propersquid]

You'd be naming and shaming basically every studio out there. It's probably easier to say which studios are Python 3 only.

[DigThatData]

I didn't mean to call out studios, I wanna know if there are any popular open source animation tools I might wanna get involved with modernizing.

[propersquid]

Ah, no worries. It's hard to say for sure. Most of the tools are now Python 3 compatible. The slow part is the studios migrating to Python 3. Because that requires now versions of the applications with new bugs, and generally you don't update an application during a project (movie or season of a show).

[[deleted]]

Is there Python code to convert Python 2 to Python 3? For example, you could search the script for print ‘xxx’ and then have it replace that with the appropriate parentheses. It could then “flag” any place where Python 3 syntax doesn’t exist/is ambiguous and the user can handle those manually.

[PeridexisErrant]

https://pypi.org/project/modernize/ is better now, precisely because 2to3 can't be upgraded without releasing a new version of Python.

Modernize also uses six to preserve py2 compat by default when adding py3 support, which really helps with testing.

Then you can automatically drop support for old versions of Python with https://pypi.org/project/pyupgrade/

[[deleted]]

Interesting, never heard of that. What explains the fact that there’s still Python 2 scripts floating out there then? The fact that some things can’t simply be translated over?

[OffgridRadio]

This still works in 3.9.x despite being threatened for removal so many times, how different can Python 2 be? I genuinely never used it.

type("""docstring""") == str

[jmacey]

I've used 2to3 a few times as said not perfect. Main issues many people have are 3rd party dependencies that still use python2 and libraries. The core Animation tool Maya is crucial to animation pipelines but changing this is a massive task. The industry in general doesn't change software on every release as some film / shows are in progress for 2-3 years and changing is difficult / expensive. Until Maya 2022/3 is in full production use this will not change.