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by pmiller2 1905 days ago
So? Python 2.x is just as good for this, and is pretty widely available. Besides, I don't write scripts for every production machine in the world, just a subset that I have access to.
1 comments

So, a bash script written ten years ago probably still works on any version of bash since then.

A python script written ten years ago probably doesn't even parse on python3.0, let alone python3.6 (because there have been backwards incompatible changes since 3.0 even!).

And that's also true vice versa.

So like, this is to the point that there's some "reasonable subset" of python you can use to make it portable (ie. no external packages so you don't need to worry about pip vs. setuptools or venvs or whatever, let alone whether they'll build). I'm asserting that there is not.

Not too long ago I discovered that a tiny temporary shell script I gave to a team to validate Akamai cache was still being used nine plus years later. It was supposed to be a short term work around until the UI team created a proper validation. They never did and somehow my script kept working for almost a decade. The only reason I found out was due to a minor change in our UI that broke the manifest lookup url pattern.
Again, so? Maybe you should update your scripts more than once every 10 years?