Popularity of Python:
Python is hugely popular these days. It’s used in tech stack for simple web apps to machine learning and IoT projects. The sheer simplicity, scalability and scalability provided by python has resulted in it being a preferred choice for a variety of projects across education, healthcare, fintech, analytics, logistics and much more.
Python being an easy language to read and code, being robust and scalable has resulted in quick adoption for across industries.
Love from developer community.
Python gets a lot of love from developer communities. Easy availability of better documentation and worldwide support has furthered it’s quick adoption for across industries. Complex projects could be built faster using libraries and packages. Libraries and packages helped cut down the initial development cycle and also made it easier to add in new features and functionalities to a product.
Python has an excellent selection of libraries, from NumPy and SciPy for scientific computing to Django for web development. There are even a few libraries with a more specific focus, like scikit-learn for machine learning applications and nltk for natural language processing.
Why fix it if it ain’t broken?
Python 3 was released eons ago in 2008, but saw a slow adoption across developers. After a pressing deadline to stop the support for Python 2, the need to upgrade to Python 3 became inevitable.
Even though key Python 2 libraries may continue to work, sooner or later your Python 2 applications will start witnessing security vulnerabilities and become riddled with bugs. Most of these third party libraries are supported by developers in their free time. With focus shifting to Python 3, most developers will tend to stop support for Python 2 libraries.
With security updates from the python community will come to a halt migration will be inescapable. But depending on the scale of applications, few may consider pushing off the migration process. Seasoned developers may support such applications by patching in security fixes to the libraries and supporting Python 2 beyond EOL. Adding new features will require additional developer efforts. The only way to get in new features into python 2 would be by means of custom development or forks.
You do need to consider if it’s a wise choice to incur the additional costs, face security exposure and the fact that there might still be chances of bugs creeping in into your applications with the legacy code. Migration can help save direct costs or developer time which would be otherwise spent on security upkeep and maintenance of the outdated libraries that are included in your project.
Your application security matters!
Security should be top on top of your list if your project is in used across critical domains such as healthcare. Even IoT projects take up security as a topmost concern to prevent unscrupulous elements getting access to connected devices. With the developer community support for Python 2 heading south, only way for security upkeep would be to take the onus of security audits and patching in security fixes for the application yourselves. This becomes critical if your projects requires long term client support or maintenance. The costs involved for security upkeep can shoot up drastically as your project scales.
Best practices for upgrade:
If you are considering long term support for mission-critical projects then a staggered upgrade to Python 3 would be an ideal solution. You can continue with maintenance and development and introduce Python 3 gradually into your projects. This approach saves valuable development time.
If you find yourself swimming in unknown waters then our resident python team can lend you a helping hand. They are qualified and have supported similar security and maintenance upgrades to active python based software being used in the healthcare industry.