r/Python • u/SheriffRoscoe Pythonista • 8d ago

News The Move to Python 3 Begins!

As someone who spent decades in the mainframe community, I find it ... humorous ... that there are legacy Python2 code bases that are only just (or have yet to consider!) moving to Python3.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/the-move-to-python-3-begins

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u/iluvatar 8d ago edited 7d ago

As CTO at my previous company, I had to veto developers who wanted to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3. The amount of effort required for the migration and the fairly low chance of a trouble free switch just didn't make a good business case for a working codebase that brought in millions in revenue each year and paid all of our salaries. All new development was in Python 3. But existing running code just had too high a risk and too low a reward for migrating.

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u/big-papito 8d ago

I feel like big refactors like this are ideal for a clanker like Claude. Manual migration, sure - no fun there.

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u/kosz85 8d ago

Yep, now we have such tools, but this is quite new and recent approach. In my times we had to... ;) But if this code is that much critical, I wouldn't dare to leave it to AI only. Also there is a case of context size. We speak about really big codebase. And sometimes knowing how it inter connects, and why is what ai is lacking in reasoning.