The Incredible Growth of Python (stackoverflow.blog)

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 9:20 PM, Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey Chris,
>
> This is an area the Python community can improve on. Even I would encourage
> someone new to Python and wanting to do webdev to use Python 3.
>
> But if someone comes onto the list, or IRC, and says they need to stay on
> Python 2 then please drop the dozens of e-mails and comments about
> upgrading. Help the person learn; that makes them happier with Python and
> when the time comes to switch to Python 3 they probably will.

If you read back in my emails, you may find that I actually wasn't
telling you to upgrade to Python 3 - just to Python 2.7, which is an
easy upgrade from 2.6, and gives you the security fixes and other
improvements that come from using a supported version of the language.
Is it "hostile" to tell people to upgrade like that? If someone is
using Python 3.2 today, I'm going to strongly recommend upgrading to
the latest 3.x. If someone's using Windows 98, I'm not going to say
"well, here's how to get everything working under Win98", I'm going to
say "upgrade to a better OS".

If that's hostile, I am not sorry to be hostile. At some point, you
have to either get onto something supported, or do all the support
work yourself.

ChrisA