[CJefferson]

No, I'm getting sick of my code being broken.

My C code from 15 years ago works fine, but code in other languages can end up breaking within a year. I've moved much of my development back to C++ just so I can have reasonable confidence my code will work when I come back to it in a couple of years.

I don't care if Python 2.7 never gains another feature, as long as my code will still work in Windows 13 and Mac OS X 10.17.

[ben_jones]

There's something to be said about "small" languages. Whenever Golang does a point release I update all my production code without a fear in the world, not because I have to, but because their may be a performance improvement here or there that I get for "free". I think I skipped 1.5 and 1.5.1 because of a slight regression when they switched to a go-based compiler/runtime but other then that yeah, awesome.

Conversely I'm always behind on Node as it's realllly annoying when a third-party lib breaks from an update. Larger packages will be fine but when you're dealing with say a Meteor package derived from an NPM package it's pretty shitty.

[StavrosK]

My python code from 2000 will be supported until 2020, so I'm not sure which language you refer to when you say it'll "break within a year".

[Svenstaro]

Your C code might still work but are you not relying on any libraries which might have been updated in 15 years in a non-backwards compatible way and thus broken your build?

[CJefferson]

It's not perfect, I'll admit.

I'm probably in a special area -- algorithms research. I tend not to use many libraries, and I'm often taking code written 10-20 years ago and wanting to get it working. The code is often VERY complicated, and I don't really want to reimplement it.

Finally (and probably most importantly) I don't care about security holes, I'm not going to run this code on malicious input.

[afarrell]

How many dependencies maintained by others does your Python 2.7 code rely on?

[ieverdream]

right tool for right job :). You use python for specific purpose, if the Python won't be maintained anymore, you can keep the current compiler, so it doesn't matter.

[dalke]

How is a language supposed to make backwards incompatible changes, when it's eventually found that the original style contains substantial flaws?

Would you want the world to still be using K&R C? Because I remember the transition from that to ANSI C, and the special macros to make function prototypes work across both languages. The Python transition is little different.

[fallenshell]

It's called "moving forward". The technology sector moves fast, and you need to keep up. Nothing is ever going to get better with that sedentary mindset.

[shawkinaw]

Well, if you ask me, backward compatibility should only be broken with extreme reluctance, because it's a huge waste of time to be rewriting things that already work. See also Angular 2.

[fallenshell]

This was a major release. 2 to 3.