Python 2/3 Migration

Are people really still so closely wedded to Python 2 that they find it easier to reimplement all the features they need from Python 3 in the former, instead of switching to the latter?

Python 3 came out in 2008. If the 2 vs 3 differences are still biting you you probably have bigger problems to solve (deprecated, insecure, unmaintained dependencies for example).

Serious question: What are the reasons people are still preferring Python2 over Python3? (No troll intended)

Surely the ten+ year Python 3-is-incompatible-with-2 saga was also a mistake.

There was nothing wrong with Python 3, what they really messed up is to give so much time for the transition. 10 freaking years!!! That's the problem, people won't do anything unless you light fire under their asses.Ruby f-cked up with 1.8 to 1.9 transition (notice that it was also a minor version change) yet people migrated without a problem because they knew that if they stay on 1.8 soon their programs will stop working everywhere.Python did everything they could do to help mig

Yeah, there's nothing like the Python 2 to Python 3 transition going on there for the umteenth year.

This seems unfair to Python 3. The Python community, including the developers of Python 3, have not been encouraging people to migrate to Python 3. In fact, it was never in their roadmap for people to migrate immediately. The common wisdom has always been 'When starting a new project from scratch, if all the libraries you need are ported, and you won't need backwards compatibility down the road, then use Python 3. Otherwise, use Python 2.x'.It's quite difficult to get people to use your new v

Part of it is that Python 3 does not offer any really strong reasons to switch to it, in an existing code base. It is definitely better and rounds out a bunch of small problems and inconsistencies that exist in Python 2. It also does have some cool new features. However, since Python 3 is not compatible with Python 2 (there is very good tooling for automatic converting and supporting both in one code base) many developers have not taken the time to port their code.

I'm not a Python developer but what I've seen and find frustrating is the slow migration of libraries to Python 3. Some projects have switched to 3 and some are sticking with 2 for now. Some applications are using 2 because they have dependencies using 2, but as those dependencies switch applications have to deal with combining Python 2 and Python 3 dependencies.I know each issue is easy in isolation, but we're talking about old 25M line codebases here. If such things exist

Python 3 is not backwards compatible with Python 2. The developers have always stated that Python 3 will be a 5 year project until the entire standard library is ported.