In your eyes is anything that isn't getting more and more features added every few months necessarily obsolete? Can't something just become mature and fulfill its goals at some point? Do you consider T-shirts to be obsolete too? If they kept adding more and more attachments ("features") to your clothes every few months to prevent them from becoming "obsolete" you'd be walking around in really heavy clothing...
Your comment is particularly apt as the programming language du jour is driven by fashion, not technology. We could still be using COBOL and be just as productive churning our CRUD apps as we are with the latest JS frameworks today... But one's hot and one's not.
The reason COBOL is obsolete is because there are no useful programs which are easiest to express in COBOL anymore, unless you are already using COBOL. It us truly obsolete in a way unrelated to fashion. Even if somebody were to supply the tooling, writing apps in COBOL would not be as productive as using a more modern language. It just lacks the expressiveness.
For comparison, C is not obsolete because a lot of useful programs are easiest to express in C still. I'd argue that C is obsolete for App development too, but there will be people who disagree with that.
This is just wrong. For example, the "best" recording microphone (to many artists), the U67, can no longer be made because the parts aren't available anymore. Yet it is the most popular mic, and 100% not obsolete.
Similarly, Python 2 might not be made anymore, but it is used everywhere, and people are making new things with it. So...it's also not obsolete.
That's not for the manufacturer to decide. Python 3 is like Coca Cola declaring that the New Coke is all people should drink, and stopping production of classic coke.
Python 2 is still being "worn" by millions of programmers, and is what runs in the biggest installations. This includes new code written for those installations, that it's written to run in the same 2.x environment.
> That's not for the manufacturer to decide. Python 3 is like Coca Cola declaring that the New Coke is all people should drink, and stopping production of classic coke.
That is within the rights of a manufacturer though. Coca Cola can continue to produce classic coke because it isn't any more or less complicated to produce than New Coke. The PSF's opinion is the new features they develop are best developed on top of the core changes in Python3, and that adding new features to Python2 is too expensive to maintain in addition to Python3.
I feel like the cases are too different to work.
Python 2 is still being "made" in the sense you consider T-shirts are still being made, though. it's still provided for download, and people are downloading it and using it, and even using it for new things. Heck, it's even getting bugfixes which is a plus. It's just not getting features added, and it happens to be software so reproducing it happens to be trivial compared to "hardware" like clothing.
So, do your comparisons correctly. No matter how much you insist, Python 2 just isn't dead (or obsolete, etc.). Lack of new features doesn't imply obsolete.
You can still download the operating system for an Amiga, yet the Amiga is obsolete (despite diehards still using 31 year old computers).
Python 2 is no longer being actively developed. It receives bug fixes, and even those are scheduled to stop before too much longer. The fact that people are using Python 2 means that it's not dead, but that doesn't mean it isn't obsolete.
Think of it this way. You need a library to solve some problem, and you find one on Github. The project hasn't received any major updates in 3 years. Some people have submitted pull requests, and a few of them have even been merged, but it's clear that the maintainers are focused on other projects these days. Is that an indication that this project is simply mature and no further work is required? Or could it indicate that the maintainers want to work on other things, and this is not a priority for them any longer?
Saying that Python 2 is obsolete isn't an insult. Python 2 is popular, and loved by many, many people. It has been adopted as a teaching language by many schools, has inspired multitudes of people to learn to code, and has achieved prominence in data science, machine learning, and scientific computing. It also happens to be at the end of its lifecycle, development has moved on to Python 3, and the developers don't have much interest in maintaining Python 2 any longer.
That doesn't diminish the accomplishments of Python 2 or the people who love it. However, it does mean that the label fits.
(No, it's not related to the matter at hand, and certainly should not be taken as an attempt to further complicate this not especially fruitful wrangle. But it's a goodie and you reminded me of it so I figured I'd share.)
Well, in some respects T-shirts made in the 80s are obsolete, even though functionally they still work. Fashion changes, materials change, cuts change, etc.
You could still wear them today but you'd be working against today's "protocols".
