[coldtea]

>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"...

[sametmax]

> Forever?

You can have support forever.

You just can't have it __for free__ forever.

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.

[coldtea]

>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...

[sametmax]

> 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.

[coldtea]

>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.

[mistrial9]

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?

[rspeer]

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.)

[Nadya]

Why 2.7? Why not 2.2? Why not 1.3? Why not 1.0?

At some point you need to require others to update. Or they can hire consultants like companies do for Cobol.

[mistrial9]

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.

[Nadya]

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.

[coldtea]

>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.

[Nadya]

>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.

Businesses that fail to adapt to changing markets/technology have nobody to blame but themselves when they've had 10 years to adapt or die. I struggle to find any sympathy for them outside of employees ringing the death bell who were ignored. Also, just to reiterate, 2.7 won't be going anywhere - businesses will need to accept it will cost them more to stick with it. That's the price paid for holding onto technical debt.

[coldtea]

>Businesses that fail to adapt to changing markets/technology have nobody to blame but themselves when they've had 10 years to adapt or die.

What "die"? Some of the companies using Cobol or other such older technologies (e.g. Java 1.4) are among the most valuable on earth.

And why should they adapt perfectly fine working programs? Just for the sake of it, or because devs like to rewrite stuff?

[gaius]

And FORTRAN, C, C++... all languages with ISO standards. But with Python, the current version of the main implementation is the standard.