> The python maintainers went out of their way to break things - and were smug about it. That’s what it felt like to the community.
The other side of that coin is that the python maintainers went out of their way to push back the Python 2 EOL. They kept on pushing the date back and back again, as per the sunset page:
"We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015, and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not. So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020."
The drawn out demise of Python 2 was, frankly, painful.
I have no time for whinging snowflakes complaining 12 years (2020-2008) was not enough time to migrate their code to Python 3. Hell, even the original 7 years (2015-2008) should have been long enough for 99.999999% of the community.
> I have no time for whinging snowflakes complaining 12 years (2020-2008) was not enough time to migrate their code to Python 3. Hell, even the original 7 years (2015-2008) should have been long enough for 99.999999% of the community.
I'm old enough to have read this when it came out...and it changed my view on backwards compatability (from Joel Spolsky of Trello, FogBugz, and StackOverflow fame)
If a company has production Python2 application / service (with hundreds of thousands of LOC), what business value does it bring to migrate it to Python3?
At that point, if you've got to make severe changes, folks might decide to use a language that doesn't impose breaking changes (and business cost) on them. YMMV.
If they hadn’t extended there was talk of actually forking python. Basically people needed a 2.x compatible python, and most features being put into 3 could have been backported. So you’d maybe keep u””, keep print, add futures stuff for folks targeting both and then pull in 3 stuff to reduce pressure to move. They were smart not to drop 2 cold.
The other side of that coin is that the python maintainers went out of their way to push back the Python 2 EOL. They kept on pushing the date back and back again, as per the sunset page:
"We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015, and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not. So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020."
The drawn out demise of Python 2 was, frankly, painful.
I have no time for whinging snowflakes complaining 12 years (2020-2008) was not enough time to migrate their code to Python 3. Hell, even the original 7 years (2015-2008) should have been long enough for 99.999999% of the community.