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/LungeloSLX 8d ago

Earlier on in Python 3’s life, this move was unnecessarily risky. But now staying on Python 2 is the more risky option. The lack of security updates, buggy libs that are no longer getting fixed

Good CTOs made the call to stay on 2 and stuck with it. Great CTOs found a way to make the migration and keep the business going

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u/iluvatar 7d ago

The perfect example of "tell you you've never run an IT department without telling me you've never run an IT department". It is absolutely not the more risky option. Are there some cases where it might be? Yes. Ours was not one of them.

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u/LungeloSLX 7d ago

Whether I ran an IT department or not doesn’t matter. There’s good and there’s great and I know which one you are

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u/iluvatar 7d ago

Ha ha. You have nowhere near enough information to be making that sort of assessment.