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Sunsetting Python 2

posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 10 2019, @04:26AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

We are volunteers who make and take care of the Python programming language. We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can.

We need to sunset Python 2 so we can help Python users.

We released Python 2.0 in 2000. We realized a few years later that we needed to make big changes to improve Python. So in 2006, we started Python 3.0. Many people did not upgrade, and we did not want to hurt them. So, for many years, we have kept improving and publishing both Python 2 and Python 3.

But this makes it hard to improve Python. There are improvements Python 2 can't handle. And we have less time to work on making Python 3 better and faster.

And if many people keep using Python 2, then that makes it hard for the volunteers who use Python to make software. They can't use the good new things in Python 3 to improve the tools they make.

We did not want to hurt the people using Python 2. So, in 2008, we announced that we would sunset Python 2 in 2015, and asked people to upgrade before then. Some did, but many did not. So, in 2014, we extended that sunset till 2020.

If people find catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in software written in Python 2, then volunteers will not help you. If you need help with Python 2 software, then volunteers will not help you. You will lose chances to use good tools because they will only run on Python 3, and you will slow down people who depend on you and work with you.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @09:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10 2019, @09:05AM (#892142)

    You can rjust, replace, etc in python3. It appears there was some reorganization - from the string lib to the str builtin, but I don't recall having noticed the difference in practice. https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/stdtypes.html#text-sequence-type-str [python.org] for details, but I expect you'll find the methods you know and love.