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I enjoy f-strings, I guess some people need these.

And I love Python but, having been through 2->3 ( occasionally still going through it! ) whenever I see a new language feature my first thought is "Thank goodness it doesn't break everything that went before it".



Yeah but it's been 17 years, maybe it's time to put the PTSD behind us. We're almost at a point where the current generation of programmers wasn't even programming when that happened.


> We're almost at a point where the current generation of programmers wasn't even programming when that happened

I've been programming with Python since 2006, I think most of the systems were based on 2.4 at the time. I've been one of those who switched to Python 3 somewhat late, waiting for some major libraries to ship python 3 packages - celery and Twisted were one of the biggest holdouts - so I remember that the first project where all my dependencies were ready for python 3 was around 2015.

This is to say: even seasoned developers who were conservative around the migration have spent more time working with Python 3 than Python 2. There simply is no reason anymore to be talking about python 2.


The last time I touched a large Py2 project was in 2018 when I ported it to Py3. So, I have 18 years of Py2, probably 6 years of overlap, and 7 years of pure Py3. That means I still have a lot more Py2 than Py3 time.

Buuuttt, I'm so over the transition. It’s ancient now and I agree that we can stop fretting about it.


Python2 code didn't disappear when Python3 came out. At my work we're _still_ occasionally having to help people migrate code that was written for python2


Also my experience, alas.

We are not completely Post Traumatic Python2 Stress yet, I am afraid.

Bad decisions can have looong-term repercussions.


We're at a point where the current generation of programmers weren't even _alive_ when that happened.


Yes, Python 3.0 was released 17 years ago. But the transition from Python 2.x was only completed with 2.7’s end-of-life, 5 years ago.


"It's still supported" is a strange metric for this. I mean, ActiveState still provides Python 2.7 builds with (paid) support.


And Ubuntu ESM got used as an excuse/"life support" for python 2 via 16.04 until horrifyingly recently. (With a layer of "you can still get ESM for 14.04, we're not that far behind" :-)




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