[wodenokoto]

Companies stuck on python 2, have known for several years that life-time support was disappearing and will do 1 of 3 things:

1) Get caught by surprise because they aren't planning. 2) Plan and pay the price of upgrading their legacy code. 3) Join an active developed (currently hypothetical) fork of python 2

I think in 2020 we'll see all 3 routes done by several companies. Better get the popcorn ready!

[zokier]

> 3) Join an active developed (currently hypothetical) fork of python 2

RedHat is probably going to keep Python2 on some degree of life-support at least until 2030 or so, just based on a guess that RHEL8 most likely will still have python2, and its support will continue for 10+ years after its release.

[data_hope]

https://github.com/dropbox/pyston seems to be option 3

[sciurus]

Or PyPy. It's development is still heavily focused on Python 2 because that's where the corporate sponsorship is.

[zeroxfe]

Also:

4) migrate to other languages, such as Go

... which is not uncommon, and in many cases a pretty good idea.

[ubernostrum]

migrate to other languages, such as Go

This depends heavily on the type of work someone is doing. People doing numeric/scientific computing work with Python can't really do this, for example, because there's a distinct lack of other languages with equivalents to the libraries and tooling Python gives them for their work. And that's a chicken/egg feedback loop problem: Go needs the libraries and tools, but in order get them needs people to move, but in order to get people to move needs the libraries/tools, and so on.

[rspeer]

And if you don't have time to switch from Python 2 to 3, you definitely don't have time to switch to Go.

[tanlermin]

Julia will be a suitable (superior) alternative soon.

[ubernostrum]

Remember that the other thing about Python is that it's got good support for other types of programming -- for example, I work at a company which settled on Python (in part) because it allows a single language end-to-end. Our data ingestion, analytics/processing/number crunching, and end-user applications based on the data can all be built in Python, and even if you're not a domain expert in one of those areas you can at least read code to see what's going on and not be totally lost.

[tanlermin]

Julia can do all that. its also a general programming language

[rspeer]

It's like you're recommending a restaurant by saying that its food is "edible".

All in all, this is a bad recommendation. Julia is version 0.4. Its syntax changes with every version. It is not going to be stable soon. It is so far from stable that it doesn't have a plan for what stability will look like.

It's fine if you want to get in on the ground floor of a programming language, or to learn a new language for the fun of it, but it's completely unreasonable to suggest that you could replace a programming language that people use for their jobs that way.

[nameless912]

Well sure, in the same way MATLAB is a general programming language. It can be done, but it'll make you feel icky.

[keypusher]

I've seen people saying this for years, yet I don't know anyone that has actually switched over. The people I do who have tried came right back to Python, often within a few days or weeks.

[tanlermin]

careful continuing that linear extrapolation...I think it's about to hit a tipping point due to packages and tooling being much better.