Python 2.7 is 12 years old at this point. Twelve years! That's the difference between Windows XP and Windows 2.1. It's completely unsupported software. There may be people still using it (sadly, embarrassingly), but anyone choosing to teach it to new programmers - what this article is about - is sabotaging them. Its quirks are irrelevant here.
This makes no sense. C is almost 50 years old, English is a bit over 1000 years old, and Euclidean geometry is something like 2500 years old. It's not embarrassing to use any of them. If Python 2 users are failing to successfully organize among themselves well enough to maintain their interpreter, which is licensed in a way that guarantees that they can do that, I guess that's sort of embarrassing, but trying to shame them for using it isn't going to help them organize better.
Comparing Python 2.7 - a release of software - with programming languages (Python is 30 years old and I'm not complaining about the use of it), human languages, and systems of mathematics makes no sense.
When discussing teaching C to beginners, no one is insisting on bringing up considerations for the C compilers of 1972 or their dialects. When discussing teaching new speakers of English how to ask someone their name, no one says, "yes, but in old English you'd need to say 'Hwæt hātest þū?'". I can't really come up with a pithy dismissal regarding Euclid, but not to get too metaphysical, the idea that Python 2.7, C, or English - human constructs - are comparable to Euclidean geometry, which is a sort of immutable construct of logic and/or human cognition, is just plain bizarre. Ideas are timeless; software isn't. I don't begrudge us for using Unix per se - it's a damn fine idea after all - but as elegant as it is, there's no good reason to be running V7 these days.
Or, to return to a different OS: again - in the year 2000, Windows 2.1 was 12 years old. Would you have said then, "there's nothing wrong with using Windows 2.1; after all, English is 1000 years old and we still use it?"
Maybe the fact that you're looking for pithy dismissals instead of seeking to learn something from the conversation suggests that conversing with you is not worthwhile.
Whether 1/2 gives you 0 or 0.5 is not an issue of the implementation; it's an issue of the language semantics.
Software is applied mathematics. It doesn't break down or wear out like an old car. There's nothing wrong with using Windows 2.1 if you like it, but it wasn't very good in the first place, and there are legal problems with copyright law that prevent you from fixing its problems and making it run well on modern hardware.
Software is applied mathematics, but much of it in fact does wear out, because it doesn't exist in isolation. It runs on and uses hardware that wears out and moves forward - do Python 2.7 or the native extensions written for it work well on Apple Silicon? It relies on ecosystems - libraries, developers, users, operating systems, compilers, networks - that move forward. This is especially true of operating systems and programming languages, because they're the basis for the ecosystems which stand on them.
And so the problems with using Windows 2.1 are precisely the same as those with using Python 2.7 - you miss out on ever-mounting additional features that make your life easier; you miss out on an ecosystem which is no longer compatible with it; you miss out on security or bug fixes and need to deal with those issues yourself; you miss out on newer, faster, more reliable or efficient or even just existent hardware (could I find a printer for a Windows 2.1 box if I wanted to?); if you're working with other people, you'll find them harder to find and need to train more and more of them as they're increasingly unfamiliar with the dated system.
And all of these effects stack - you don't just lose out on upgrades for Python, you lose out on new features or bug fixes or security updates for the libraries you use that have stopped supporting Python 2.7 too, and so on. Your world gets smaller and smaller as the rest of the world gets bigger and bigger.
If you're maintaining a legacy system, and you don't want to risk changing it in any way unless absolutely necessary, because you're a bank or controlling medical or nuclear equipment or something, then that's something to weigh. But in any case, by refusing to upgrade when the rest of the world has moved on, you're racking up a technical debt that will grow by the day.
