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by ForHackernews 2164 days ago
You mean all the Python programs started before 2008, right? Because that's when it was announced that they were sunsetting Py2.

So any projects started since 2008 that were written without Py3 compatibility had known tech debt they were choosing to take on.
1 comments
ineedasername 2158 days ago
Yes. Why does it matter than the particular example I chose had a cutoff date 2008? It's the same issue with any language, program, platform, OS, etc. Even if you implement the latest stable version of any of these things for any project, tech debt begins immediately. In fact if you're dealing with established enterprise software, you know right away what the roadmap & minimum end-of-life is from the day it's released. (as side topic, that's part of why mediocre enterprise software is often chosen over newer better options: because predictability is valued over the newest/best/fastest that may be subject to disruption if the vendor goes away or gets acquired-- something I've seen happen a few times. A vendor gets acquired, we get a "Hey Great News!" message from them along with an "Oh by the way our new parent company is transitioning everyone off our platform to their own completely different offering over the next 6 months, hope you have the capacity/bandwidth to deal it #sorry-not-sorry"
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ForHackernews 2153 days ago
> over the next 6 months

My point is this is a very different situation from the Python 2->3 transition.

If you have 12 years' notice to make some changes, I don't consider that technical debt: that's the normal price of maintaining software in a changing world. It's not "debt" that costs "extra interest" to pay back for questionable choices made previously.

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