Guido van Rossum: Python 2 end-of-life will be on January 1st, 2020
I wish we had a better term for this sort of event than &quot;end of life&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s perfectly reasonable for the team who are the primary developers of Python 2 to say they want to move on and they aren&#x27;t going to release any more updates after some specific date. After all, it&#x27;s not as if most of us are paying them for their hard work, appreciated though it is.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s also not as if Python 2 will suddenly stop working on 1 January 2020. The interpreter on my server will still run, and so will the scripts that have been using it for many years and have no reason to change because they&#x27;re still doing a useful job.<p>The situation with purely locally-installed software it typically quite different to the situation with software that depends on some remote service or runs on someone else&#x27;s server and is accessed via a web or mobile UI, where the developers <i>can</i> literally just turn it off and users immediately lose the ability to run some or all of it. I think we should be more careful about making this distinction.