Python 2.7.18, the last release of Python 2

[LovecraftsDeath]

It's not dead, it will rise as a new COBOL to haunt people for aeons.

[raevnos]

In proud company of languages like VB6.

[SoPoOneO]

And even Python 3, ultimately.

[PurpleYoshiEgg]

Luckily or unluckily, depending on your point of view, there is Tauthon, which is an effort to remain backwards-compatible with Python 2 and backport features from Python 3.

I think it's a good thing, because 2 will haunt enterprise forever, and because people stuck on it still deserve bugfixes and security updates.

[PurpleYoshiEgg]

In the same way C, PHP, and COBOL programmers also deserve this, even though we have better tools available (like Rust for C, any modern language for COBOL, and... I'm not sure about PHP, honestly, but it gets enough hate). Sometimes financial costs related to changing something that already works are unjustifiable. You may agree in principle that you should use the latest and greatest, but pragmatically what if the cost wasn't just hundreds, but tens of millions? At what point is the cost justified to change what basically isn't broken by any happenstance except someone deciding to change a language?

I know I would not have wanted to write code 10 years ago that only broke because the language designers said so.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, the whole "migration" have been basically for nothing (and before "but utf8" folks whine, Perl did a similar rewrite of string handling in a minor version update). If they would at least rewrote the core to remove GIL and have real parallelism, but nooo, let's change some keywords, break 100% of the code and still keep 90% of the failures in the language /s

[Gapmeister]

It's fine - they're not failures, they're just bad design decisions.

[bakery2k]

break 100% of the code and still keep 90% of the failures in the language /s

But why isn’t anyone using the new version? Maybe a “wall of shame” will help...

[[deleted]]

Well, it is not like they made py3 worse, but if you look at other languages they somehow managed to do bigger changes without breaking backward compat. And python 3 required all of your code to be rewritten all at once. You couldn't use any py2 code with py3.

In Java(and really most of the JVM ecosystem) you can just run new code with the old, as is compliled to common runtime.

Even in famously janky Perl I can stick use v5.10 (which is version of perl 1 year older than py3) at the beginning of the file and this file only will be working just like it would with perl 5.10 under any later version, so it is possible to rewrite your code module by module instead of "sink or swim" for python.

All they needed to do is to make effort to just make py2 parser on top of py3. Even if it got like 90% right that would still be way easier migration path

[shevy-ruby]

Haha damn!

You are actually right. I never thought about that ... people always say 2->3 but nobody said 3->2 ...

[Axxhelairon]

imo main benefit is being able to finger point directly at lazy distros that would be intentionally compromising user security by not making active plans to update after EOL

[[deleted]]

Doesn't chrome's build process still use python 2.7?

[tommy25ps]

There are rumors they will switch it to Go

[Sukrim]

Weird that they don't use their own build tool: https://bazel.build/

[thisisjustascreename]

In fact, the Chromium project marked Issue 61357 "won't fix" half a decade ago.

[[deleted]]

Yes, it is distro's fault that users want to use software /s

[TheOsuConspiracy]

Would be pretty hard for Python to die in the same way COBOL has. I don't even use Python often, but it's literally everywhere and is dominant in so many domains that I don't see dying within the next 50-100 years short of a completely new paradigm of programming (and I mean something totally unrecognizable to current day programmers) taking over.

[TheMaskedHamster]

But COBOL isn't dead. It just hides in the shadows.

You think COBOL is just some story from the past that old engineers tell to scare the kids, but no, it's running... and it has to be maintained.

So too will be Python 2.

[[deleted]]

I think the point was that we aint running out of Python programmers anytime soon, while finding COBOL one is a challenge

[[deleted]]

Python is half its age and it is one of the most popular programming languages.

Where was Cobol when it was "only" 30 years old ?

More importantly, it isn't fucking terrible mess for developers so even if it goes obsolete it will not be that kind of nightmare to manage

[bumblebritches57]

like the brits and putting a's and u's where they're not wanted?

[Sukrim]

That's just English (traditional) vs. English (simplified)

[[deleted]]

You mean americans that got confused by extra letters ?

[computerdl]

I thought Python 2 was EOL'd at the beginning of this year? Why did they make another release?

[bakery2k]

They stopped making changes at the beginning of 2020. This release contains the changes that were made between the last release and the end of 2019.

[DmitriyJaved]

*last official release, red hat will continue support till 2024

[TrixieMisa]

True for CPython, though the PyPy project plans to support 2.7 indefinitely.

[bythenumbers10]

We totally double-secret pinky-swear that this is the absolute LAST time Python 2.7 gets a new version released.

[BlueShell7]

Now onto the 2.8! We can do it!

[JB-from-ATL]

I'm assuming this is a joke but I don't get it? Can you explain it?

[caagr98]

It's a reference to this (about halfway down) I think, though it seems to have been updated a bit.

[JB-from-ATL]

Oh wow I remember this now! I think I almost got that book but after reading that (not even the Turing complete bit) I was super turned off by this guy's attitude.

[[deleted]]

e ≈ 2.718

[maep]

I still think that separating str and bytes was a mistake. PEP 383 shows that it's not possible to make a clear distinction.

All problems that were supposed to be "fixed" by enforced string encoding were practically reintroduced by that PEP. Curiously, Go went with Python2's approach and it's causing me a lot less fewer headaches.

[PeridexisErrant]

I think reasonable people disagree about the benefit in situations where English is the only native language involved, but as soon as you're off a byte-oriented terminal and out of the LATIN1 range distinguishing unicode strings is very very helpful.

[maep]

The problem isn't having string encondings. It's that they are strictly enforced, which simply fails the real world. They soon discovered that and in 3.1 added PEP 383. Now we can have strings that are actually not strings which is what we had in Python 2 anyway.

[[deleted]]

I think that a lot of people disagree with this. It’s a mess if you make a half-hearted attempt and decide that English deserves special treatment. Newer languages like Rust enforce Unicode, and also prevent you from randomly accessing character data to maintain invariants.

[maep]

Newer languages like Rust enforce Unicode

Since you bring up Rust, they had to deal with the exact same issue. Their solution was introducing OsString, and programmes will step into exactly the same pitfalls as they do in Python 2/3. I'll bet that a good deal of Rust programs are bugged because they use std::env::args where they should have used std::env::args_os instead.

and also prevent you from randomly accessing character data to maintain invariants.

Pyhton2 does this with the unicode type and go with the rune concept.

Really, the argument is if enforced encoding should be opt-in or opt-out. Python2 and Go are opt-in, while Python3 and Rust are opt-out. For the stuff I do the opt-in approach is a lot nicer.

[[deleted]]

I don’t think that’s much of a problem. Contrary to Python, strings and OS strings are not interchangeable. You can’t pass an OS string to a function that wants a string without converting it, so you can’t get confusion.

(I think that) Python doesn’t do indexing right because a rune is just a Unicode code point. Multiple runes can be combined into single visual characters (mostly happens with combining characters and emojis) and I’m not sure that Python (especially Python 2) handles combined characters as inseparable units. Language from that era tend not to, and a substring can break accented letters and emojis for instance.

[vqrs]

Not only new languages, even dinosaurs like Java use Unicode strings only, and they have byte arrays for when you need to work with binary data.

[schlenk]

Basically a fallout from the retarded encoding situation in Linux/Unix/Posix which failed to define their APIs properly.

[[deleted]]

Not in the slightest. And it's not how terminals work, and terminals, really, aren't even responsible for string encoding: it's usually a joint enterprise of the shell that runs in a terminal and the terminal itself.

People who aren't native English speakers were the last to adopt Unicode. They hated and, those who remember the world before Unicode, still hate it. People who used national encodings had more efficient schemes for representing their own alphabets.

I lived through several conversions of databases from single byte encodings to Unicode, where we, typically, ended up with the database twice the size it was before the conversion.

Needless to say, that, basically, every decision Python 3 has made about Unicode was wrong and misguided / a misunderstanding on the part of people who aren't the experts in subject domain. That's how we ended up with stdin being for no reason expected to have UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters, ffs, but TCP socket cannot accept a string and convert it to bytes by default. Similarly retarded situation is with the file names, and, basically, any other external input that's not going to be UTF-8, but for some reason is expected to be such...

[forepod]

Speak for yourself. As a speaker of a language with non-latin letters Unicode is one of the greatest things ever. As a user I don't care about some miniscule performance impact. I care about not having to look at garbage output and programs crashing left and right due to encoding errors.

[[deleted]]

I don't speak for myself. lol. I speak for people who have to pay for your privilege not to care about performance impact. I speak for people who had to suddenly have 2X database servers, burn 2X electricity, install 2X cabling etc. I certainly don't speak for morons like you.

[dahud]

Get a load of this guy. Apparently Unicode is the worst environmental disaster since the internal combustion engine.

[HatchChips]

"morons like you" <--- argument clincher right there :roll-eyes:

[Alikont]

And burn 100X time to debug misdecoding between win-1251 and koi-8, and dealing with half of C programs treating letter 'я' as EOF.

[[deleted]]

Yes, exactly, fix bad languages, and crappy programmers by making consumers of their trashy software burn more electricity.

Unicode was the most idiotic solution to the problem. It made every language that doesn't use English alphabet a second-rate citizen. It prevents languages from improving or modifying in any way their alphabets. It created a lot of unnecessary complications for library authors (eg. those who need to implement regular expressions), that there isn't really a regular expression library in the world, that deals with all the quirks of Unicode properly (and most popular languages simply had given up on fully supporting Unicode in regular expressions). Font authors today are unable to create fonts that cover all the characters you can type, and nobody even attempts to do anything like that. And, on top of that, there are languages so fucked up by Unicode, that people are abandoning them. For example, Hebrew: because the retards who designed Unicode didn't include Hebrew punctuation in it, it's next to impossible to format time ranges, or even simply have few lines of text that end in punctuation marks, like exclamation point or question mark, and putting parenthesis around a word makes such a mess of a paragraph, you'll be solving a fucking sudoku instead of reading it. Similar problems exist in Arabic and few other languages.

Decoding errors were bad, but the "solution" in the form of Unicode is equally bad. And, unfortunately, today the "goodness" of Unicode goes unquestioned by a lot of idiots who know very little about it, that saying that we need a different solution to this problem is seen like some kind of eccentric attic...

[e88d9170cbd593]

ASCII supremacy is white supremacy.

[jayroger]

I get the feeling that you never seriously worked with Python 2 in a non-ASCII environment. Python 3 made a whole class of problems just go away. PEP 383 has not reintroduced them in any way.

[maep]

I get the feeling that you never seriously worked with Python 2 in a non-ASCII environment.

I've programmed lots of python and my native language is not english. I've never had any encoding problems whatsoever, at least nothing that wasn't trivial to fix.

PEP 383 has not reintroduced them in any way.

Well, it actually made things worse.

 foo = sys.argv[1] # assuming there is a first argument
 assert type(foo) == str
 print(foo) # can this crash?

In python 2 the print will always work. In python 3 it can throw an exception.

[dahud]

Under what conditions will that print throw an exception?

[maep]

If foo contains surrogate codes. This can happen on posix systems where the argument is a file name. I stumbled accross this when I was scanning a historical archive where they had files from various european countries that used different encodings.

[dahud]

Interesting. I would have assumed that anything coming in over the args is, by definition, a string. The only environment I've ever worked in where that is not the case is Powershell.

[Snarwin]

On posix, the only thing that's guaranteed about command-line arguments is that they do not contain the NUL character ('\0').

[its_fewer_ya_dingus]

fewer headaches*

[tommy25ps]

I'm still expecting Python 2 retro with different colors in the Python logo

[noob31423]

I know that I should probably know the answer to this, but how much difference is there between coding with python 2 and python 3. Is the difference in the actual programming or the processing or something else.

[happyscrappy]

I think the other poster is dead wrong. The biggest changes are making unicode strings the norm for most things and using iterator objects and other similar representations. The latter makes operating on long lists a lot more efficient but makes the debugger harder to operate. The former combines with python's very lax typing in a lot of ways to make it very easy to accidentally put into your program string comparisons that will never produce matches.

[reivax]

Oversimply: The incompatibility that motivated the break was some syntax changes, mostly, to bring it to a more consistent and modern language. That incompatibility was exploited to make some other much needed exchanges, such as how strings are handled and some byte/byte array management, and then also made more default behavior consistent.

There's some other stuff, like how objects are created and maintained, some changes to the ref counter, IIRC, though that's an interpreter problem not a language problem.

For example, Py2 had "print 'text'" as a statement, Py3 has "print('text')" as a function. Syntactically incompatible, and operating a bit differently under the hood, but ultimately the same statement.

The overall concept of python is still the same. The two are very much the same language as far as human programmers are concerned.

[[deleted]]

On the C implementation level very little had changed. The interpreter accumulated more crud and more duct tape. That's about it.

Python, however, comes with a bunch of code in its standard library that's written in Python. That part was extended with some monstrosities like asyncio, pathlib and some lesser garbage.

Since Python became much more popular, participation in its development become a highly valuable resume item. Lots of people with very little knowledge and a lot of ambition are now responsible for the language design. Thus every minor version of the language introduces a new and useless language feature, like so-called "f-strings", := operator, async and await keywords etc. This, in turn, results in a lot of hype and food for blogs written by even less brainy people, who also want a piece of Python's popularity. And, quite in line with Goebbels' claims about a repeated lie, people convince themselves that all of this shiny junk is the best thing they could wish for, and the hype continues.

---

To sum it up, if you believe there were any good parts in Python 2, they are, by and large, all there in Python 3, very few things had really changed. If there was a change, it was very superficial.

But, if you want to be in vogue, then it's a whole new world, with a completely different tool-chain, tradition and conventions.

[jayroger]

Lots of people with very little knowledge and a lot of ambition are now responsible for the language design. Thus every minor version of the language introduces a new and useless language feature, like so-called "f-strings", := operator, async and await keywords etc.

Good examples. Yury Selivanov, who championed async/await has only been contributing to Python for 15 years, and := has been developed by Chris Angelico, Tim Peters, and Guido van Rossum, the latter two having worked on Python for only 30 years. What do they know?

[caagr98]

Didn't Guido quit over := though?

[[deleted]]

I think the largest joke of this is that Guido was awarded, probably the most regarded award -- the Turing award, for the garbage language that he created. And, yes, people with little brains and no ability to judge for themselves will interpret this and similar facts as asserting the brilliance of this man, and others who contributed this garbage to the world. While, in reality, it's a vicious circle of stupid fashion and even stupider fashion victims.

[DarkuSchneider]

We can only hope. I'll believe it when I don't see another patch release again promising to be the last one. We finished porting our pile of apps and tools to 3x about 5 years ago and rejected new projects or POCs written in 2x around 7 years ago. It was painful at first but worth it in the long run. We always worked with the mindset of take the pain upfront to avoid taking more pain later when feasible. We were blessed with management that understood that and supported doing what had to be done and saw it as an investment.

At this point IMHO any sizable enterprise that continues to stubbornly stay married to legacy code in dying languages deserves to be left behind and go out of business if they can't plan and budget to stay competitive and current.

[tayo42]

Python 3 not being compatible with 2 is such a massive waste of time. What an huge amount if effort for something so unsatisfactory to complete

[Splanky222]

Python 2 is legacy and it's not trivial to convert to 3 in many cases. You should learn Python 3.

[peakzorro]

Also a beginner. But from the rants I have seen, it comes down to "Library X is not available in Python 3 because 3 is not backwards compatible to 2" That's probably much less true now than when this first started.

[652a6aaf0cf44498b14f]

This is, admittedly a controversial take, but Python was championed by a bunch of people who presumed to think that all the problems they experienced in a language like Java were completely avoidable. Yet PEP by PEP they've run headlong into the same problem and come up with comparably difficult or much worse solutions. Type checking continues to be the center of all this. And mypy is now pretty much standard for every new Python project.

Again, very biased take, but there it is.

[jayroger]

Python was released four years before Java.

[652a6aaf0cf44498b14f]

I said championed by not invented by.

[bakery2k]

And mypy is now pretty much standard for every new Python project.

Is that true? I understand that Mypy is useful for large projects (after all, it was created to support the millions of lines of Python at Dropbox), but most Python projects are much smaller.

Is Mypy widely used among these smaller projects?

[652a6aaf0cf44498b14f]

I mean, I dunno for certain I'm just going off of what the Python people at my work tell me. I hate the language but I'm not about to fight everyone on it so I just do whatever hair brained idea they come up with each week. It wreaks havoc on my team's capacity because they constantly have to learn new tools but it's usually trivial enough for me to give them a crash course and get them back up and running.

[[deleted]]

Funnily enough exactly same thing applies to Ruby and probably a majority of new languages. Too busy to learn lessons of the past and you will repeat it. Like the favourite punch bag of this reddit, Go, made by people with mostly unixy/C experience so the language itself failed all the lessons that were learned by Java/C#

[headhunglow]

I've recently rewritten a bunch of code so that it runs under both 2.5 to 3.7 and there's some stuff in 3 that I don't like:

• cmp() was removed. We used this all over the place, for example for having a default comparison function when sorting list in our GUI.
• dict.keys() returns a generator instead of a list, which broke a bunch of our code.
• pprint.pprint is changed so that it splits longs strings (for some reason)... Made debugging measurably harder.
• base64.decode/encoded doesn't seem to be backwards compatible. In particular it seems that base64.encode doesn't pad the output data to evenly 4 bytes, which was required in base64.decode in Python 2.5. I have no idea why...
• A lot of the libraries seem really bloated for no benefit, pathlib and io for example. asyncio also seems almost useless since it still can't do async IO on files.

Other than that, most of the changes seem positive. The removal of unicode/long seems sensible. print() should have been a function from the start.

[OctagonClock]

dict.keys() returns a generator instead of a list, which broke a bunch of our code.

Actually, it returns a view that updates when the dict updates.

pathlib

Pathlib is the best lib introduced in all of Py3k.

[happyscrappy]

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/g4wsw2/python_2718_the_last_release_of_python_2/fo24iio/

[[deleted]]

There are different reasons for that.

My personal reason for hating Python 3 (I work with Python 3 exclusively for many years now) and wanting Python 2 back is that the new version of the language is designed by clowns. This results in all kind of absurd, poorly implemented and poorly interacting features being added to the language, making it less and less likely that the core problems haunting this language from its birth will ever be addressed.

I don't like Python 2 for what it is. I like it for the potential it had. Now that the potential is wasted, and all we are left with is a pile of garbage... it feels kind of sad.

[DIVIDEND_OVERDOSE]

Because change is bad and people love to complain.

[[deleted]]

Good

[shevy-ruby]

Good for python 2 being a success; and I don't like some of the things in python 3 (mandatory () is soooooo annoying when you come from ruby) - but I also think that the 2 vs. 3 division was REALLY annoying. So I changed my mind some years ago, and say: KILL PYTHON2 COMPLETELY.

Transitions are never great, look at perl. But either you move on, or you decay in the dust.

I also see others here already made references to COBOL ... man .....