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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

That's pretty bad. I don't think there is any binary compatibility that would be broken with having Python 3 as the standard one.

It took a long time for Red Hat and Canonical because a lot of the OS was written in Python 2.x, but Apple doesn't have that excuse.

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Well, almost every single user who has written a Python 2 program, or program which uses Python 2 internally, would find their code broken in /usr/bin/python moved to Python 3.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple just stays on Python 2 forever. Apple already does some patching to their copy of python when they upgrade OS, and it would require a fairly small amount of manpower to keep Python 2 running forever.

Apple is quite happy breaking and deprecating things between macOS versions, why would some legacy scripts that are already in support only and will be EOL in 2020 change that? Unless they use it internally, why would they spend money on maintaining a Python version at all?

Maybe for e.g. RHEL it makes sense to maintain Python 2 beyond end of life, since they can charge an arm and a leg for companies who have been too lazy or complacent to port and upgrade their stuff, despite clear and generous deprecation timelines. But I don't buy this for Apple.

Just because the Python devs want to declare Python 2 eol, Apple can do what they want.

There are many pieces of software (bash and clang as major examples) where Apple keep custom branches, often of otherwise unsupported versions.

It's funny how when it comes to the actual hardware, Apple is among the first to adopt and customers are often forced to buy dongles and new peripherals, but when it comes to installing a major version of Python that was released a decade ago this December, Apple is happy to not push people.

Because I imagine Apple sees value in pushing new hardware, but not in pushing Python 3.

I hope they made a lot of money from the dongle division.

Their adoption of newer CPUs is, on the other hand, write disappointing.

I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro that was released with a CPU one full generation behind its competition.

I would just be happy with /usr/bin/python3. That’s how it works on the popular Linux distros per https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

Python 2 (and Apple ships a vintage version of it) is on /usr/bin/python whereas Python 3 usually gets installed on /usr/bin/python3. The corresponding versions of pip, ipython and others usually get the '3' suffix. That's what Canonical and Red Hat do. If you need Python 2, you can install it yourself.

Apple would break compatibility if it removed Python 2, which it could do, if they really wanted.

They don't even have the latest version of Python 2.x though!

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