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by Ellipsis753
4446 days ago
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I just thought I'd like to know what Hacker News thinks.
Will Python 2.x ever die? I'm still writing lots of code with it and even quite a lot of new code. It's been around for ages and it feels like almost no libraries have been ported to 2.x yet. On a couple of occasions I've started a project with Python 3.x just to drop it or move to Python 2.x as a library I need doesn't seem to exist for Python 3.x and I don't want to port it over myself. I've never had this issue with 2.x (no libraries support 3.x only.) Most Python 3.x "killer features" have been back-ported to Python 2.x and I honestly feel little reason to upgrade myself now. When support for Python 2.7 is officially dropped we could fork it and continue. I would hope it wouldn't take huge amount of effort for some people to support it? Just fix bugs and security issues and take pull requests? In that way might Python 2.x even outlive Python 3.x or at least remain more popular? |
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My guess would be that Python 2.x will die at the same time that Python dies, i.e. the "transition" to Python 3 will never really happen, and part of the reason that Python will die is the split between 2 and 3.
I don't think it was obvious that Python 3 would "fail" in this sense, but it seems pretty likely now. Sympathy with Guido; this is essentially a cultural problem rather than a technical one, but as a rule backwards-compatibility tends to be a key component of success as a programming language (or library, or even O/S) evolves.
It's not too late -- a compromise could be found, but it would essentially involve abandoning 3 to a large extent. Not very palatable.
I'm sure Python has many years to go though, so I wouldn't worry about writing new code for the moment. Keep an eye on how things develop and think about jumping to another language if no-one sorts out this mess.