Python @programming.dev ruffsl @programming.dev 9 mo. ago

Python developers won’t let go of Python 2

www.infoworld.com Python developers won’t let go of Python 2

Python Software Foundation survey finds that a significant number of Python developers are still using Python 2 for data analysis, computer graphics, and devops.

43 comments

I think the biggest problem would be libraries which are not available in 3.x. I just rewrote a python script some time ago and the syntax changes were pretty easy to change with search and replace.
- I don't see a problem. For one, it's been 15 years: the vast majority of libraries have been ported by now. And like you said, you can fix the syntax with basically a find/replace script, so any stragglers can be modified easily.
  
  There really isn't any excuse to still be using Python 2 anymore
  
  While I agree that people should have moved on for a while, the idea that porting Python 2 to 3 only involves "find and replace" or a tool like 2to3 is only true in the most trivial cases. Anything that touches bytes, unicode, network or files to do anything remotely involved needs a lot more care. I should know, our codebase still suffers from the occasional bug due to this, even though it's been years.
Not sure why it is a big deal for most things. I was a 2.7 die hard and was forced to move to 3.x a few years ago. Had to rewrite a bunch of crap at first but once it was done it's been a lot better than I thought it was going to be at first.
- Not sure why it is a big deal for most things.
  
  Close source libraries written by third party contractors in non web/internet/research related domains.
  
  What it means is that you will always have a small portion of Python devs that will stay on Python 2.
  
  Even if you fork it and rename it to Snake 2, you will always have devs working on a language named Python 2.
  
  I get that. My job is mostly writing Python scripts to keep an old Fortran based framework going, so I cringe when people get married into a language like this. I feel that all code should be adaptable and be able to absorb upgrades and changes. But I certainly understand. From my perspective if they were to rework my old Fortran code, it would take them at least a year or more to do it well. Most companies don't want to spend that sort of effort.
- Python's public API changes subtly, so minor changes in Python version can lead to massive changes in the version of dependencies you use.
  
  A few years ago we developed a script to update Cassandra on Python 2.7.Y. Production environment used Python 2.7.X (it was 5 patch releases earlier).
  
  This completely changed the cassandra library version. We had to go back 15 patch releases which annoying resulting in a breaking change in the Cassandra libraries API and wouldn't work on the dev environments Python.
  
  Python 3 hasn't solved this, 2 years ago I was asked to look at a number of Machine Learning projects running in docker. Upgrading Python from 3.4 to 3.8 had a huge effect on dependencies and figuring out the right combination was a huge pain.
  
  This is a solved problem in Java, Node.js has the same weakness but their changes to language spec are additive so old code runs on new releases (just not the inverse). Ruby has exactly the same issues as Python
  
  I very much doubt that you can run old code unchanged on newer Java versions. Especially not without dependency updates
  
  This problem is not exclusive to Python
  
  I swear it's just as frustrating as Minecraft modding and picking the right forge version for all the mods you want. And OF COURSE your 2 favorite mods aren't on the same version so you can't use them together. I'm legit learning to mod Minecraft just so I can port them myself.
Well, TBF there is a lot of avenues to get locked into legacy software in python. I am still modifying and using Python2 code because the drivers and libraries for hardware are only available in python2 and the hardware developers wont spend the money and time to create Python3 libraries. So I am stuck using an airbridged, un-updated python2 environment until it gets to the point of updating/backwards engineering python3 drivers and libraries for all our hardware ourselves.
- What hardware drivers are written in Python? I would assume they're bindings to drivers with a C interface.
  
  I should have been more specific. Yes, it is a wrapper around a closed source blob.
  
  Take a look at micropython, some drivers are writing in pure python, I've written a display driver previously
  
  I guess I should have been a bit more specific as it is a closed source blob with a python wrapper that can't be updated without at least the headers or backwards engineering it.
Won't or can't?
- Both. There are many breaking changes that can make your code completely incompatible. Some people won't bother to port their code. Others could be using an obscure or niche library that hasn't been updated for 3 and can't port their code.
  
  Third category, software provided as part of an ancient service contract that nobody is allowed to touch, even though the service partner stopped offering support for this particular software years ago. Ask me how I know
- At the old job I was using IronPython (2.7) to write Grasshopper plug-ins in the Rhino CAD software. Luckily, it was mostly responsible for kicking off Python3 and Go subprocesses.
  
  Now, the worst I’m stuck with is 3.8 for one of our repos using PyTorch.
yeah. my pain exactly. the only thing that keeps me well is 3.12 in my personal projects.
- How ya likening the latest hotness?
I had no idea, never having to deal with library updates must be nice 😆
At this point Python 2.7 should be forked into a new language. They could call it something like Daudin, after the person who coined the word Python for the genus of nonvenomous snakes
- Snek2.7
  
  Yea, fuck my name this is way better
  
  Danger noodle 2.7
- You'd have to find someone interested in maintaining it for at least security fixes and I'm guessing everyone capable is more interested in just working on new stuff for Python 3.
- Someone submit a PEP for it!
I don't do enough for it to matter, what's wrong with 3?
- It's different enough.
  
  There are huge python 2 codebases that can't easily be ported to python 3.
  
  Meh. I’ve ported a fair many py2 projects to 3. At this point just bite the bullet. Even from a security standpoint. Trying to not let my bias seep through - but it’s been so long.
- Nothing, because it's not related to Python 3.
- Python 2 had one mostly-working str class, and a mostly-broken unicode class.
  
  Python 3, for some reason, got rid of the one that mostly worked, leaving no replacement. The closest you can get is to spam surrogateescape everywhere, which is both incorrect and has significant performance cost - and that still leaves several APIs unavailable.
  
  Simply removing str indexing would've fixed the common user mistake if that was really desirable. It's not like unicode indexing is meaningful either, and now large amounts of historical data can no longer be accessed from Python.
  
  Thanks for that context. Seems odd that they would remove the str instead of taking the time to fix it.

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