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Comment by ynik | Hacker News Reader

python3 in 2008 was practically unusable. It was incompatible, none of the libraries on pypi supported it; and it was extremely hard to write a code base that was compatible with both python2.6 and python3.0 at the same time, so almost none of the library authors bothered to add python3 support.

In 2010, python2.7 was released, backporting a bunch of python3 features. In 2012, python3.3 was released, fixing a bunch of needless incompatibilities. This finally made it viable to support both 2.7 and 3.3 in the same code base. For the most part, the migration of the Python library ecosystem only started in/after 2012.

python3 wasn't really a viable choice for application development until most libraries were ported (2014? 2015?).

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I think a lot of people forget this long, slow rollout. Even after most major libraries were ported, it took even longer to be able to count on every dependency having a Python 3 version available. RHEL didn't default to Python 3 until RHEL8 was released in 2019, for example.

It's hard for me to forget just from how much bullying and grief people were given for why they hadn't switched to Python 3 yet. Some of the steps that people took were wildly uncharitable and behavior that turned me off to the Python community entirely.

So much so that I had a visceral reaction to reading the GP's question about why this hadn't been done. My default reaction was to read it as accusatory rather than a genuine question.

Still running some containerized 2.6 and 2.7 workloads and there are no engineering dollars to justify doing anything about it. Dead code can still be running code and can hang around for _decades_.

Due to Reasons, I am still stuck on Python 2.7. Should be an interesting jump.

I didn't start using Python 3 till 3.6 was released, so not until 2017. I've been writing Python since 1.5.2. I just didn't find Python 3 compelling/usable till 3.6. I recall f-strings being a really nice ergonomic improvement.

I always appreciated them for calling it Python 3000[1] at its inception to signal to users that it was going to be very different and take a long time to fully land.

It is a great example of how to do it, and I say that as somebody who used to write a lot of Perl 5 and kept wondering when Perl 6 was going to be available.

[1]: https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/

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