I haven't seen it before, but from the abstract, their central result is that 
most projects are maintaining compatibility with Python 2. This doesn't come as 
a surprise, but I'd add the words "so far".

They cloned repositories in March 2017. In fact, they already picked up IPython 
and Django moving to drop Python 2 support, but they dismissed that because 
neither had made a release with those changes, so it "cannot be taken as 
evidence of a definitive move to Python 3". Both of those projects have since 
made Python-3-only releases.

They refer to 'applications', but a lot of the codebases they examined are 
libraries or frameworks (django, numpy, wxPython, etc.). This is a crucial 
difference. Libraries and frameworks need to maintain compatibility for old 
versions of Python until they can be reasonably sure that the people building 
on top of them are ready to move. For many projects, that is only now becoming 
true.

A number of the projects they analysed have signed http://python3statement.org/ 
to indicate a plan to drop Python 2 support in the next couple of years.

Thomas

On Wed, Jun 20, 2018, at 10:57 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I got a link to this paper on another email list. The person there thought it
> might enable Python 2 to have a new resurgence and lead to the death of Python
> 3. I am not entirely sure he was joking. Personally I am not sure the paper is
> sound in that they seem to be making assumptions and thence deductions that
> the sample doesn't support.
> 
> Has anyone else seen this? Anyone any thoughts about it?
> 
> 
> https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~malloy/publications/papers/esem2017/paper.pdf
> 
> 
> -- 
> Russel.
> ===========================================
> Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
> 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
> London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk
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