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Python is a very bad example because of the incompatibility between Python 2 and Python 3. All my pre-2012 Python code is now legacy because of this, and since most of it is not worth updating I will only be able to run it as long as there are Python 2 interpreters around.

I like Python as a language, but I would not use it for something that I want to be around 20+ years from now, unless I am ok doing the necessary maintenance work.

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There's a script to update from python2 to python3, it's now the most used language in the world, and they learned their lessons about the python2 to python3 migration. A python3 script is literally the most likely candidate to be still working/maintenable by someone else in 20 years.

They are actively removing modules from the base install.

does 2to3 not suffice / work for your code?

It never worked for any of my nontrivial python files, even for simple projects it often failed. It was a good start, but it was not a fully automatic magic migration script. Otherwise ecosystem migration wouldn't take ages as it did.

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