| ... Said the COBOL developers. To some degree, you may be correct, that there will be companies that refuse to upgrade for many years. By and large, I think most people will start to switch: * Small orgs will begin to see costs of maintaining legacy code skyrocket as it becomes harder and harder to get 2.7 interpreter support for newer kernels. Those that aren't already transitioning now will eventually bite the bullet. * Medium orgs will probably be the laggards. They have enough funds to pay someone else to make compatible interpreters for them. Your observation about manager authorization very likely applies here so many probably won't bother to upgrade without an internal skunkworks-style initiative. * Large orgs will upgrade. Their infosec departments will freak out that an old, "potentially insecure" language is being used, regardless of third party vendor support. I see this a fair bit now in the PHP space; where RHEL supports and backports patches for old, insecure versions of PHP, but the infosec people still can't stand it. These days, infosec is getting more and more pull in every huge organization, so it wouldn't surprise me at all to see them start to treat 2.7—or the old, un-updated packages that are locking someone to 2.7—as a possible attack vector and force a change. All that said, you are right about jobs. If someone knows 2.7 inside and out, they will start to see higher and higher paying contract gigs over the next 15-20 years. Just like the COBOL programmers saw. |
I am super curious what Google will do. The thing to watch is whether Chrome/Chromium (and therefore Node.js) can ever be built without using Python 2.7.