The text encoding stuff wasn't a small change considering what it could break, at least. And remember we're sometimes talking about software that would cost a lot of money to migrate or upgrade. I still maintain some 2.x python code-bases that will be very expensive to migrate and the customer is not willing to invest that money.

Although your general sentiment is something I agree with(if it's going to be painful do it and get it over with), I don't believe anybody knew or could've guessed what the reaction of the ecosystem would be.

Your last point about being able to change internals more freely is also great in theory but very difficult(if not impossible) to achieve in practice.

I don't know. Having maintained some small projects that were free and open source, I saw the hostility and entitlement that can come from that position. And those projects were a spec of dust next to something like Python. So I think the core team is doing the best they can. It was always going to be damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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eru 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> I still maintain some 2.x python code-bases that will be very expensive to migrate and the customer is not willing to invest that money.

Slight tangent: if Claude can decimate IBM stock price by migrating off Cobol for cheap, surely we can do Python 2 to 3 now, too?

About the internals: we sort of missed an opportunity there, but back then there also didn't quite know what they were doing (or at least we have better ideas of what's useful today). And making the step from 2 to 3 even bigger might have been a bad idea?

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scorpioxy 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wasn't aware that migrating projects off Cobol has become cheap and it would only take a Claude subscription.

In my experience, the problem had always been maintaining the business logic and any integrations with third-party software that also may be running legacy code-bases or have been abandoned. It can get quite complicated, from what I've seen. Now of course if you're talking about well maintained code-bases with 100%, or close to 100% test coverage, and that includes the integration part along with having the ability to maintain the user experience and/or user interface then yes it becomes a relatively easy process of "just write the code". But, in my experience, this has never been the case.

For the 2.x code-bases I maintain, the customers simply doesn't want to pay for any of it. They might choose to at a later time, but so far it has been more cost effective for them to pay me to maintain that legacy code than pay to have it migrated. Other customers have different needs and thus budget differently.

I'll refrain from judging if 2 to 3 was a missed opportunity or not. I believe the core team does actually know what they're doing and that any decision would've been criticized.

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Tempest1981 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IBM shares fell 13% in a single day in last month:

"IBM Sinks Most Since 2000 as Anthropic Touts Cobol Tool"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-sinks-most-since-2000-210...

It may not be "cheap", but possibly cheaper than IBM's consulting.

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scorpioxy 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I skip news like that. It's an AI business hyping one of their tools in a major AI hype-cycle. Shares can go up and down based on sentiment. My point still stands.

To me, there's a big difference between saying that migration projects can now be assisted with some AI tooling and saying that it is cheap and to just get Claude to do it.

Maybe I am out of touch but the former is realistic and the latter is just magical hand-waving.

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PurpleRamen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Share-pricing operates on illusions. Just selling a plausible claim can influence the price. Whether they will deliver at the end, doesn't matter at that moment.

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eru 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Feel free to correct the market and make oodles of money.

	▲	kelipso an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Risk my money based on a bunch of wallstreetbets idiots yoloing their money using a random number generator and seeing the word AI on twitter posts, sure lol. I’ll let you play in that cesspool.

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Marazan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

IBM share price is back to where it was pre-Anthropic press release.

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thaumasiotes 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but imagine how much higher it would have gone in the counterfactual world where Anthropic didn't have an automatic port-from-Cobol tool.

	▲	Maxion 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Remember that those who trade on the stock market are not programmers with decades of experience writing cobol.

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eru 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I believe the core team does actually know what they're doing and that any decision would've been criticized.

I agree with the latter. About the former: they probably made a good decisions given the information available at the time. I mean that nowadays they know more than they did in the past.

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CJefferson 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Absoultely, I had a 2 -> 3 code base I'd mostly given up on, and Claude was amazing. It even re-wrote some libraries I used without py3 versions, decided to just write the parts of the libraries I needed.

It does much better with good tests. In my case the output was a statically generated website, so I could just say 'make the same website, given these inputs'.