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Comment by x1024 | Hacker News Reader

Wait, Python 3 has existed since 2008 and the transition is at 20%? How is that any form of success?

He said that 20% have reached "Acceptance", the last of the 5 stages, and said that most people are in stage 4 (Depression). That'd put overall progress at more like 80%.

This article also wasn't actually talking about adoption of python 3, just applying the stages of grief to how people feel about it. IOW, adoption of python 3 might still be worse than 20%, but 20% have accepted that they will need to adopt it soon.

Anecdotally as a full time python guy, I'd agree with the OP. The number of people interested in Python 3 has been growing a bit every year, and it seems opposition to adopting it at all has finally mostly dwindled :)

I still find reasons to be pessimistic. OpenCV was really really late to support Py 3.

Every pypy release focuses on Py 2 only (and Py 3 releases are an afterthought). Really weird prioritization for me (I'm not interested in legacy-focused projects).

If you read the wiki link in the article, the 'stages of grief' aren't stages that you progress through. They're different ways of dealing with loss, and you won't necessarily hit all of them or do them in any particular order.

More importantly, these stages have nothing to do with choosing either Python 2 or Python 3. Python is just a tool. If one doesn't work, you choose another, and if the developers of that tool decide to screw it up, you just move on.

Overall progress is not 80%, by any meaningful metric.

I mean sure, if we take the 'people who like python 3 and eat burgers but only use python 2 while drinking lemonade sampled from a group of 20 people down at the pub', I guess maybe we're at 80%, but now you're just inventing random statistics for no reason.

The only relevant statistic is people actually using python3, and that number is not 80% (and not even close).

According to the python community survey of 2014, 80% of users are still using Python 2. Of course, that was two years ago, but 2014 was still six years after Python 3 was released. (https://wiki.python.org/moin/2.x-vs-3.x-survey)

If the python developers were any normal business, they would have abandoned Python 3 and returned back to developing what their customers obviously prefer; the problem here is that the python developers essentially concluded that because users get python for free, they aren't customers at all and the python developers can do whatever they want and their users will eventually be forced to fall into line.

Except they won't...

Python users are refusing to migrate to Python 3 as a community. It's a shame that the python developers have decided to try to show their customers who is boss because it won't work--the developers will lose. Many people will continue with 2.7 forever and fork the language in 2020 like Perl 5 day. The rest, like me, have dumped python and moved on to greener pastures.

Yep, it's true. My company started a major python2.7 project in 2015.

Pretty smart bet. You have production-ready PyPy to migrate to, and can always port to 3.x if it ever takes over (looks like never).

What's "Perl 5 day"?

Sorry... s/day/did

Backwards incompatible language changes having not killed the community and gaining traction after 7 years is pretty good going.

It isn't a success when compared with other languages, no. I myself am a bit guilty. I have nothing against Python 3, but it is almost as if I want to "stay out of it" so I tend to default to using 2.7.

I think my use of Python overall (like others in this thread have mentioned) has decreased as a result of the 2-vs-3 move. There are other reasons, but the 2-vs-3 added to the list of reasons to make me reexamine building new projects in Python.

20% is a really, really optimistic guess.

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