Moving Away from Python 2
I&#x27;ve seen this story happen twice before.<p>20 years ago there was this great MP3 player, WinAmp 2. And then they released WinAmp 3, which broke compatibility with skins and plugins and which was slow. People didn&#x27;t upgrade. Finally, they came to their senses and they released WinAmp 5, marketed as 2+3, which was faster and brought back compatibility with older stuff.<p>In the retail trading Forex world, there is this great trading app called MetaTrader 4. Many years ago they released MetaTrader 5, which broke backward compatibility and removed some popular features. People didn&#x27;t upgrade. Today, they are finally bringing back the removed features and making MetaTrader 5 able to run MetaTrader 4 code.<p>Me, I wait for Python 5 (=2+3) which will be able to import Python 2 modules, so that you can gradually convert your code to the newer version.<p>I have tens of thousands of lines of Python 2 code in a big system. I can&#x27;t just take 2 months off to move all of it to Python 3. Moving it in pieces is also not really possible, since there are many inter-dependencies.<p>Uglyfying my code with the &quot;six&quot; module it&#x27;s also not a solution, since when I&#x27;ll move, I won&#x27;t care about Python 2 anymore.<p>So basically I&#x27;m just waiting until a consensus emerges.<p>It should be noted that the quantity of Python 2 code keeps on growing, I wrote most of my code while Python 3 existed. If Python 3 allowed an easy path forward, we wouldn&#x27;t be in this situation.