<story><title>All Python versions less than 3.6 are now EOL</title><url>https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jghn</author><text>I struggle with this whenever I think about it. On one hand I agree with all of the points you make. But on the other hand, it didn&amp;#x27;t have to be this way. Python 3 has been out for 12 years now. If people hadn&amp;#x27;t dragged their feet on converting the mess wouldn&amp;#x27;t be nearly as large as it wound up being.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>About every other month I have to help a biologist who has pulled down an older program from Github debug why it broke in their data only to find that they were trying to run in Python 3 instead of Python 2. These are people that can write shell scripts, but don&amp;#x27;t program. It makes me aware of all the old code out there that is not used super frequently, but still solves people&amp;#x27;s problems, and would continue to if there hadn&amp;#x27;t been breaking changes.&lt;p&gt;As I write Python 3 now, I am less than impressed with the reasons for breaking compatibility. I&amp;#x27;m told that it was necessary for proper bug-free Unicode code, but there&amp;#x27;s enough difficulty when using, say, gzip, and little enough documentation about the &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; way to handle Unicode that I doubt that it will actually reduce Unicode-related bugs.&lt;p&gt;Python is still a great tool, but Python 3 really took the shine off for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>disown</author><text>The problem is why should people be &amp;quot;converting the mess&amp;quot; in the first place. Backward compatibility, especially when it comes to programming languages, should be a given. If anything, this is reason that people should stop using python.</text></comment>
<story><title>All Python versions less than 3.6 are now EOL</title><url>https://devguide.python.org/#status-of-python-branches</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jghn</author><text>I struggle with this whenever I think about it. On one hand I agree with all of the points you make. But on the other hand, it didn&amp;#x27;t have to be this way. Python 3 has been out for 12 years now. If people hadn&amp;#x27;t dragged their feet on converting the mess wouldn&amp;#x27;t be nearly as large as it wound up being.</text></item><item><author>epistasis</author><text>About every other month I have to help a biologist who has pulled down an older program from Github debug why it broke in their data only to find that they were trying to run in Python 3 instead of Python 2. These are people that can write shell scripts, but don&amp;#x27;t program. It makes me aware of all the old code out there that is not used super frequently, but still solves people&amp;#x27;s problems, and would continue to if there hadn&amp;#x27;t been breaking changes.&lt;p&gt;As I write Python 3 now, I am less than impressed with the reasons for breaking compatibility. I&amp;#x27;m told that it was necessary for proper bug-free Unicode code, but there&amp;#x27;s enough difficulty when using, say, gzip, and little enough documentation about the &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; way to handle Unicode that I doubt that it will actually reduce Unicode-related bugs.&lt;p&gt;Python is still a great tool, but Python 3 really took the shine off for me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cortesoft</author><text>I am not sure why the length of time matters.&lt;p&gt;They were spending the time doing other important things. They were making the rational decision to work on something that was important and WASN&amp;#x27;T already working. The python 2 code was working fine, it didn&amp;#x27;t have bugs and it didn&amp;#x27;t need any new features. Other code either didn&amp;#x27;t exist and needed to be written or had bugs that needed to be fixed.&lt;p&gt;It makes sense that changing working code never made it high enough on the priority list to get worked on.</text></comment>