[Python-Dev] The end of 2.7

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Sun Apr 7 23:41:21 CEST 2013


On Apr 06, 2013, at 06:54 PM, Raymond Hettinger wrote:

>At this year's Pycon keynote, I surveyed the crowd (approx 2500 people)
>and all almost everyone indicated that they had tried out Python 3.x
>and almost no one was using it in production or writing code for it.
>That indicates that Python 2.7 will continue to be important for a good
>while.  

Now that porting has reached the top of the food chain (e.g. Twisted, Django)
I think these numbers will change.  Some from porters, but also from new
projects which can start with a clean slate and avoid endless UncodeErrors and
rafts of other problems.  This will produce downward pressure on lagging
libraries to adopt Python 3 or get left behind, and that should increase the
momentum.  Python 3 *is* being used in production, but today it's limited to
new code bases and ports where all the dependencies are already there.  Now
we're identifying key bottlenecks, such as (for us) Xapian, and places in the
language or libraries where more help is needed.  Some bottlenecks have
already been fixed (e.g. for us, dbus and OAuth, where the most popular
library is already abandoned upstream for 4 years, but there is thankfully a
great replacement that's Python 3 compatible).

I talked to someone at Pycon who was still using Python 1.5, which is probably
older than some of the people on this list ;).

-Barry


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