[jdormit]

> If you need to rewrite your code to enable the py3 transition, the issue isn't python, it's your coding choices, and you should rewrite your code anyway.

I... don't even know what to make of this advice. Have you ever worked for an engineering organization with more than 5 members? I can't just go to my boss and say, "I need the next six months to rewrite our whole backend". I'd get laughed out of the room.

Without a clear, business-first reason for an engineering project of that magnitude, it's not ever going to be a priority or a realistic option.

[nicwolff]

I migrated a production (Django 1.10 + Django REST Framework + lots of custom code) API backend at a major publisher that handles over 500 requests per second from Python 2.7 to 3.7 this year. It wasn't that hard, even without 2to3 or six – mostly just chasing down string vars that now needed `.encode('utf-8')` on their way out the door. We saw an immediate 30% performance increase, so management has been real happy with the effort.

[joshuamorton]

> I... don't even know what to make of this advice. Have you ever worked for an engineering organization with more than 5 members?

Yes.

> Without a clear, business-first reason for an engineering project of that magnitude, it's not ever going to be a priority or a realistic option.

I'm not suggesting that there is any realistic solution. I'm simply stating that the cause of your pain isn't py2 to 3, but bad development practices that existed independent of language or migration. These were going to cause you pain at some point no matter what. It just happened that py3 was the forcing function, as opposed to something else next year.

[jdormit]

While I won't deny that there were some unfortunate design decisions made in the codebase (some very questionable choices were made at some point), I think that's inevitable in any codebase of a certain size and age that's been worked on by enough people in a company that's changed substantially a number of times.

But that's not the cause of my pain. Bad code can and will be written in Py2, Py3, or any other language. The cause of my pain is that the language developers chose to abandon work on the language that we use in favor of a different language, one that is fundamentally different in some important ways. As a result, the tooling and ecosystem on which we've built our product is slowly stagnating and is getting close to being fully disfunctional.