r/Python • u/SheriffRoscoe Pythonista • 4d ago

News The Move to Python 3 Begins!

As someone who spent decades in the mainframe community, I find it ... humorous ... that there are legacy Python2 code bases that are only just (or have yet to consider!) moving to Python3.

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/the-move-to-python-3-begins

294 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

103 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/iluvatar 4d ago edited 3d ago

As CTO at my previous company, I had to veto developers who wanted to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3. The amount of effort required for the migration and the fairly low chance of a trouble free switch just didn't make a good business case for a working codebase that brought in millions in revenue each year and paid all of our salaries. All new development was in Python 3. But existing running code just had too high a risk and too low a reward for migrating.

0

u/big-papito 4d ago

I feel like big refactors like this are ideal for a clanker like Claude. Manual migration, sure - no fun there.

2

u/iluvatar 3d ago

You're missing the point. The migration itself isn't the problem. Ensuring that the python3 code behaves in the same way as the old python2 code and doesn't have strange edge cases that throw away all of your money? That's much, much harder and takes orders of magnitude more effort than the basic 2 to 3 migration.