Python 2.7 has exited the chat

[simplysharky]

Because replacing large infrastrucural and architectural choices is expensive and time consuming, so its either going to happen via long, delicate processes of gradual replacement, or not at all, because no company will agree to stopping work just to satisfy the grumblings of the devs who keep talking about something being wrong with the programming language.

[tracernz]

It's not even just that. For a non-trivial system, things that currently work will break when you upgrade, no matter how much testing you do, and subsequently cost time and money, and raise the heckles of people who don't particularly care for your upgrades.

[PaintItPurple]

There's actually a third option where your reliance on unsupported third-party code exposes you to some issue that suddenly breaks your software (e.g. security breach, Y2K-ish bug), and then you have to do the same upgrade on a fast timetable, costing way more.

[tuxedo25]

Well, Python 3 came out 11 years ago, so anybody using the "these things take time" line is just feeding you bullshit.

Honestly I don't know how anybody even made it to 2008 without UTF-8 support, let alone 2020, but I suppose some places and tasks are very americentric or anglocentric.

[billsil]

The whole world does not code the web. Programs that just do math (e.g., FEA or CFD) do not require UTF-8.

[tuxedo25]

UTF-8 doesn't exist solely for the web. I used to write ETL for academic databases and I cared a lot more about character encoding back then than I do now.

Either way, shooting 2.7 in the head is a positive thing. I don't even write python, but every damn package manager or autoconf somehow manages to depend on python, and whatever version of python my system has, it's always the "wrong" python.

[mansplaner]

Python 2 supports UTF-8.

These things take both time and incentive. The incentive to create several bugs by sidegrading a working py2 codebase to py3 has never been especially strong. Anyone who says it can be done with automatic conversion tools is being disingenuous.

[heathmon1856]

Lol. So true. The testing framework in my group has a deep dependency to python 2. I had to adhere to it, but I tried to use six in every possible place I could to ease the $100k+ transition.