After A TON OF PAIN I decided to put the time in to watch the talk "Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?"[0] by Ned Batchelder and it all just clicked. Now, I make unicode sandwiches like a boss.
Does writing python 2 code stop being 'worth it' at some point? If so, where is that point? It sort of sounds like you're already there. There's still people using P2 at least in part because of all the hoops people are jumping through to keep supporting it, no?
I'm not a professional python dev, so it doesn't impact me as much as some of my colleagues, but 'backwards compatible' issues crop up in other platforms/langauges as well. Wordpress might be the biggest example in PHP. They've kept a minimum target language which is far behing 'current' or even 'currently supported', and it's been a catch 22. Hosts keep supporting PHP 5.4, for example, far later than they 'should' have, because people kept writing new stuff targeting PHP 5.4. WP 5 was, alas, a missed opportunity to target PHP7 as a minimum. :/
How do you know I'm there? If nothing else I still have my own previous Python 2 code that I've spent time on and that's useful to me! Why would I just throw them all away or waste massive amounts of time rewriting them into Python 3? Is my goal supposed to be to please the masses here?
Honestly that's sufficient reason already. But if you want a more "standard"/politically-correct response: Python 2 is still being supported, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS literally only just reached EOL last month and can be found in the wild, Python 3 support is lagging in a lot of places (e.g. PyPy is still on 3.5, although I'm just using it as an example; I don't use it much), and I still come across Python 2-based tools and packages once in a while.
So I guess the answer to your question is it "stops being worth it" when I stop coming across situations where I'd regret abandoning Python 2.
> There's still people using P2 at least in part because of all the hoops people are jumping through to keep supporting it, no?
"Because" is an odd way to put it... it's true that if they didn't support P2 then people would use P2 less, but people use it because it benefits them, not "because it's supported". I mean, you're also alive "at least in part because" of all the hoops people jump through to grow and bring food within your reach, but I doubt your conclusion is that this should stop being the case...
> They've kept a minimum target language which is far behind 'current' or even 'currently supported', and it's been a catch 22.
What I don't understand is why are people supposed to keep abandoning good software just because someone made something shiny and declared it "unsupported"? I hate this "you have to like my updates... or I will force you" attitude that every organization seems to have nowadays. People are trying to solve their own problems, not please the leader they're following.
> Hosts keep supporting PHP 5.4, for example, far later than they 'should' have, because people kept writing new stuff targeting PHP 5.4.
I mean, this isn't even the same situation? I'm not targeting Python 2 or introducing a dependency on it generally. I try hard to keep my code both Python 3 and Python 2 compatible. So the decision as to whether to move on or not is left to the client (which is often myself) and there's no obstacle either way.
