Old Man Yells At Cloud

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2017 04:05 pm, Paul Rubin wrote:

> Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info> writes:
>> Having to spend a few hours being paid to migrate code using "print x"
>> to "print(x)", or even a few months, is not a life-changing experience.
> 
> Didn't someone further up the thread mention some company that had spent
> 1.5 years porting a py2 codebase to py3?

Its possible, but if so I missed it.

And did I mention one of the coders at the company I work, who decided to port
our Python 2 code base to Python 3? He stayed behind one night after hours and
did it in three hours. We've been talking about it for about two years.

What are we to make of anecdotes like these? Apart from the possibility that
one, or the other, or both, is an exaggeration or lie[1]?

- perhaps one code base is bigger than the other;

- perhaps one is an unspeakable mess, and the other is nice clean code;

- perhaps one has masses of unit tests while the other barely even works;

- perhaps one company has good coders and the other has terrible coders;

- perhaps it was 1.5 years elapsed time, ten days effort (I've worked
  with people like that).

Who can say?

95% of Python is unchanged from Python 2 to 3. 95% of the remaining is a trivial
renaming or other change which can be mechanically translated using a tool like
2to3. Only the remaining 5% of 5% is actually tricky to migrate. If your code
base is full of things relying on that 5% of 5%, then you'll struggle.
Otherwise, is probably much easier than people expect.




[1] I admit it: mine was an exaggeration. It actually took him four hours.

-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.