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0 pointsmumblemumble5y ago0 comments

At this point, I swear, the main source of difficulty in Python 2->3 is all the foot-dragging in migrating to Python 3. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that vastly more Python 2 code was written in the past twelve years than in the preceding eight.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

josefx5y ago· 3 in thread

> the main source of difficulty in Python 2->3 is all the foot-dragging in migrating to Python 3.

My main difficulty was having targets that ran python 2 and wouldn't get an official python 3 package unless a miracle happened. Meanwhile most systems supporting python 3 also had a python 2 package. Ended up porting a few scripts to a statically linked c++ binary, those should keep on working until we get 128 bit systems that drop support for 64 bit binaries.

busterarm5y ago

You learned an important lesson about distributing software and business risk.

In my experiences trying to deploy software at scale (10^4~5), statically linked binaries are the only acceptable form of software.

yjftsjthsd-h5y ago

If you don't have a pipeline to update those static binaries, you're just giving yourself a different form of headache 5 years from now when you need to apply bug fix.

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formerly_proven5y ago

That’s very true but making “static distributions” of Python apps is a fairly hacky/annoying problem with lots of room for subtle breakage. In practice one static pkg per major district version seems advisable.

Curiously Linux, despite having an extremely stable user space interface, suffers from a high degree of user space incompatibility. This starts with glibc and its components and ends with graphical toolkits. Go seems to be very successful because it ditches all of that crud and goes for the stable interface instead.

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MattGaiser5y ago

A friend of mine uses Python in his lab. Tons of them were writing Python 2 code when they were learning it two years ago (Feb 2019). So they started from scratch with it two years ago.

EamonnMR5y ago

Lots of people probably wrote against whatever python their system shipped with which was inevitably a python 2.

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