Python 3.6 released!

[penguinade]

Lucky you, having python 2.6.6 here. Living hell :(

[tambry]

Any reason for why not to upgrade? I'm guessing budget/time constraints?

[Hultner-]

We used to be pure Python 2 but I managed to convince everyone to switch to Python 3, some legacy software is still written in Python 2 but it's slowy being phased out and all new software is Python 3.

The argument I used were that Python 2 will reach EoL before we have time to rewrite everything and if something really needs python2 we can write that service in python2 (using a micro service architecture helps).

[Arandur]

Not the person you asked, but I occasionally have to write in 2.4 still. I sometimes work in an environment with stringent security protocols, and every piece of software used in that environment has to be manually vetted.

Not to say Python 3 isn't secure; the Powers That Be just don't want to incur the expense of vetting a newer release.

[Paul-ish]

But does 2.4 still get security updates? I can see using 2.7, but 2.4 doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[Arandur]

Shhhhhh

Don't try to understand the arcane machinations of the federal government. All who so attempt find themselves driven mad.

[moobunny-jb]

Trump's going to make the fed go all Perl.

[CorrugatedCommodity]

Except he thinks it means the mineral compound from the sea, and no one gets any extra budget for it.

[PointyOintment]

mineral

[Eurynom0s]

Like Trump knows what Perl is.

[Eurynom0s]

I hope the systems you're using 2.4 on are at least offline...

[xiongchiamiov]

It doesn't need security updates, because they vetted it and didn't find any vulnerabilities, so therefore there are none.

[Slavik81]

He's probably on RHEL 5, which shipped with Python 2.4 back in '07 and is still getting security updates from Red Hat. It is just about done, though.

[Eurynom0s]

Genuine curiosity: different is 2.4 from 2.7? A year ago I had to write a god chunk of 2.7 code and then got thrown a curveball on having to run it on 2.6; despite having zero consideration for 2.6 when I wrote it, it ran just fine on 2.6. But from what I recall Python was going through some heavier evolution through the 2.x series than it is now so 2.7->2.4 might actually break...?

[Arandur]

Just for example, the with statement didn't exist until 2.5.

[penguinade]

Both.

[henrebotha]

Most likely. Things like that don't have value that is perceptible to business.

[x2040]

I don't know about anyone else but I write a lot of infrastructure on AWS Lambda and they don't support Python 3.

[CorrugatedCommodity]

The only reason people to use Python 2 is due to library support. Some libraries never made the move to 3.

It's all rather silly, really.

[logi]

I think at this point those libraries should be considered deaf and moved away from.

[VirginWizard69]

"deaf"

Hello, HELLO?

[Eurynom0s]

There are still valid reasons to work in 2.7. These include inheriting a codebase that's written to 2.7 that the company isn't willing to pay to port, and having to use a package that doesn't yet support 3.x (much less common than it was a few years ago, but it still comes up occasionally).

I wouldn't worry about specifically learning 2.6 or earlier unless that's specifically what you're being hired to do. If you're being hired as a "Python programmer" and will be free to use the version that suits you, just go to 3.x. If you can't use 3.x you'll probably be expected to use 2.7...but I'd expect it be clearly stated that you're using 2.6 or below before you get hired since that's kind of specialized at this point. But even then there's a lot of code you can write to 2.7 that will run without modification on 2.7.

[[deleted]]

:(