If you need Python 2.7 support after 2020, consider asking a consulting company to provide it for you.
Python is maintained by volunteers. Providing support for more than 10 years is more than enough in my opinion. The community has moved on to 3, but I'm sure there will be companies doing consulting and fixing 2.x bugs for a fee.
No you don't understand, they are evil people for stopping to give us free candy after they did so for 10 years. They can't be working on better new free candies now, that's even worse ! Monsters !
It's been a long road
Getting from there to here
It's been a long time
But Py3 is finally here
And I will see my dreams come alive at night
I will touch the sky
And Py2's not gonna hold me down no more
No it's not gonna change my mind
Python 2.7 has been stable and supported for almost 8 years -- how much more long term do you want? Even releases of Java only seem to get about 6 years of support.
>Python 2.7 has been stable and supported for almost 8 years -- how much more long term do you want?
Forever? 2.x codebase are in the millions of lines of code in companies, and they won't be converted or go away anytime soon. And those will need security updates and bug fixes.
Note that Google and Dropbox are still running tons of Python 2.x -- and those are two companies where Guido Vas Rossum himself has worked in the last 10 years.
Not consider the average company with tons of Python 2.x code. It's not going anywhere soon.
Heck, why is everyone surprised by this? Or is it just 20 year old first time pro devs that are surprised? The world still supports tons of Cobol and other "old" language code -- some running for 3-4 decades after a language went "out of fashion"...
There are companies out there that will happily sell you the service.
You already get an amazing tech for free, and support of 2 decades in you take all the 2.X branch in consideration (e.g: 4 times the ubuntu LTS). You complaining at this point is just insulting the community.
I find it infuriating. When the JS or Ruby community breaks stuff, they give a few weeks notice, and a few months to migrate. Nobody complains. Python give 10 years, a lot of tooling and tutorials, and some people keep complaining. This is where being too nice is a problem.
In 2020, I'll triple my price for any work on 2.7. I'm done being fair to people with such ingratitude.
>In 2020, I'll triple my price for any work on 2.7. I'm done being fair to people with such ingratitude.
This doesn't make any sense. You're not running a charity. If you can get customers with the tripled price, then do triple it. If you can get customers with a 100x price, you'd be a fool not to 100x your price.
If, on the other hand, you can't get customers for triple the price, then tripling it will just make people go to someone else. You're not hurting anybody either way...
> This doesn't make any sense. You're not running a charity. If you can get customers with the tripled price, then do triple it. If you can get customers with a 100x price, you'd be a fool not to 100x your price
You say that because you see business as only a gateway to make money. But if you work in the libre community, you'll see that ethics and promotion of the libre is a very important part of it. It's also why FOSS people make less money.
>But if you work in the libre community, you'll see that ethics and promotion of the libre is a very important part of it
For how many people? Most major FOSS people I know work in large companies from Red Hat to IBM and Joyent. Heck, speaking of Python, Guido worked for Google and Dropbox.
And most of the others are volunteers.
Besides, I wouldn't call "tripling the price" when you don't like the client using an older version exactly "ethical".
Have you talked to the client? Do you know their costs and externalities for a 2.7 -> 3 rewrite of their existing (and working code)? It's not like they are capricious and want to use 2.7 out of malice.
many companies have made much money from the free work of volunteers, yet those exploiting companies are blameless, while proponents of a useful and stable technology are glibly mocked?
Cobol, Fortran 77, ANSI C and stuff like that lasted a long time -- but they didn't have batteries-included standard libraries, and there was no expectation that they would be maintained against things such as security threats. That just wasn't part of the design of a programming language at the time.
(Can a classic programming language specification have a security hole? Absolutely. Consider the case of gets() from C.)
Python 2.7 is stable and useful now.. it is a lot of C code implementing a scripting language. There are a lot of libraries that work well right now, that took hundreds of skilled years of work to build.
The same can be said thousands of 16 bit applications that are no longer supported on 64-bit architecture. Python 2.7 isn't being deleted from the face of the Earth. You're just going to have to pay people to maintain your legacy codebase because after 10 years of knowing it will become obsolete you stuck with it.
>The same can be said thousands of 16 bit applications that are no longer supported on 64-bit architecture.
And some of those are a big loss as well.
But most of them are obsolete and deprecated (because e.g. Office suites, OSes and gaming moved on) in a way that Python 2.x programs used in businesses are not.
And Python 2 has run for 18, if we're counting by major versions. Heck, as long as you're okay with little changes like booleans not looking like integers anymore, you can run your Python 1 code 24 years later.
But imagine if Python followed the example of Perl. Python 3 becomes a curious side project, everyone moves back to Python 2, which goes on for decades without new features. At last, Python can have all the popularity and relevance of... Perl 5?
Python 2 will not stop running in 2020. No bomb is gonna explode. The dozen of volunteers will just stop providing free work for bug fix and security update.
The problem with this logic is it could be extended indefinitely into the future.
Python 3.3 has been available since 2012. 2020 was already a deadline that had been pushed back at least once for 2.x. I understand volatility, but 5+ years in the software world is an eternity.
I guess we're getting off topic here but can't help myself.
> ...5+ years in the software world is an eternity.
There is no particular reason why we can't maintain stability. I can still run [some] Microsoft DOS programs from the '80s, though finally most of them need DOSBox to run. For the scientific programming community we need to be able to rely on relatively ancient code. This is why FORTRAN and Matlab are still used. For example the release notes for g77 at https://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/ say
> Legacy g77 code will compile fine in almost all cases
That's code from 1977 - 40 years ago! And the release notes are just nudging people towards the 1995 language standard, not declaring deprecation.
> There is no particular reason why we can't maintain stability. I can still run [some] Microsoft DOS programs from the '80s
In fact, there isn't, you are 100% correct. I don't think anyone on the python dev team thinks that somehow 2.7 "can't" be maintained.
Grab the 2.7 branch [1] and build and test it on your favorite OS. If it still works tomorrow or next year, or in the 2080s, congratulations! You got a working product and you apparently didn't need any support.
> That's code from 1977 - 40 years ago!
Python's popularity will ensure that some group, somewhere will champion 2.7. And maybe in ~2030 we'll still see active support.
But you can. You will be able to run Python 2 in 5 years if you want. Nobody prevents you too. The official community will just stop working on it. Just like for DOS, which an alternative community picked up.
> The world still needs (and runs) untold millions of lines of Cobol.
shrug python organization isn't responsible for delivering a Cobol toolchain. They said they've set a deadline and it's open source so there's bound to be some popular vendors out there who you can buy support from. Just like you buy support from your Cobol vendor.
Most people who consume python are consuming it from a downstream vendor like a linux distro anyways. Commercial distros will likely offer extended support packages.
Python is maintained by volunteers. Providing support for more than 10 years is more than enough in my opinion. The community has moved on to 3, but I'm sure there will be companies doing consulting and fixing 2.x bugs for a fee.