Pythonic Y2K

[Michael Torrie]

On 01/16/2019 12:02 PM, Avi Gross wrote:
> I recall the days before the year 2000 with the Y2K scare when people
> worried that legacy software might stop working or do horrible things once
> the clock turned. It may even have been scary enough for some companies to
> rewrite key applications and even switch from languages like COBOL.

Of course it wasn't just a scare.  The date rollover problem was very
real. It's interesting that now we call it the Y2K "scare" and since
most things came through that okay we often suppose that the people who
were warning about this impending problem were simply being alarmist and
prophets of doom.  We often deride them.  But the fact is, people did
take these prophets of doom seriously and there was a massive, even
heroic effort, to fix a lot of these critical backend systems so that
disaster was avoided (just barely).  I'm not talking about PCs rolling
over to 00.  I'm talking about banking software, mission critical
control software.  It certainly was scary enough for a lot of companies
to spend a lot of money rewriting key software.  The problem wasn't with
COBOL necessarily.

In the end disaster was averted (rather narrowly) thanks to the hard
work of a lot of people, and thanks to the few people who were vocal in
warning of the impending issue.

That said, I'm not sure Python 2.7's impending EOL is comparable to the
Y2K crisis.