IBM does quite a good job of making sure that COBOL is supported long term with all needed updates for many many years to come. Python 2 is not in that position.
You mean, IBM does quite a good job of making sure IBM COBOL is supported long term. They are maintaining their compiler, which is exactly what PSF is doing. They are maintaining their interpreter, which is Python 3.
The GP post missed the fundamental difference between keeping COBOL running and keeping Python 2 running. Python 2 was also PSF's interpreter. IBM handling a COBOL upgrade like PSF handling the 2-3 transition would be unacceptable.
These are two very different kinds of institutions!
People who need COBOL support from IBM are paying a lot of money. Giant piles of money can get you many kinds of help that people won't volunteer to do for free... among them, maintaining ancient software in amber.
If you need Python 2 support and you are willing (and able) to pay the kind of money that IBM's customers pay for COBOL support, you'll be OK. For a start, Red Hat (aka also IBM!) shipped Python 2 in RHEL 8, which means they'll be supporting it until 2029 at the earliest.
To circle back to the original point, no COBOL committee would break commonly running COBOL programs like the Python 2-3 transition. Using COBOL in an example with Python is just wrong. Maybe the break is justified, maybe it isn't, but some languages do a lot of work to make sure things continue to work.
Would PSF exponentially increasing support and maintenance costs for Python 2 into multimillion dollar contracts and bundling over-margined hardware in with the bundle to make it more of an IBM-like transition help?
Yep, someone has to pay in one way or another like Red Hat customers on 7, but to say Python has near the life cycle of COBOL is just disingenuous. Old COBOL still runs, but Python 2 programs will not. It really shows what the achievement languages like COBOL, RPG, and Fortran are in terms of longevity and migration.
Er, why not? It's not like there's some kill switch in Python 2 that will make it stop working after January 1st, 2020. If it works now, then it'll still work, you're just not guaranteed fixes anymore. At least, not for free. As stated in the article, paid support options exist from several vendors.
Right, but in engineering it's kind of expected to get support for a version for at least 60 years. Software engineering is just really weird in that it moves so fast and nobody seems to care to break things.
