Support for Python 2.7 stopped and will no longer receive bug fixes or security updates

Python devs will now focus entirely on Python 3

The first day of the New Year officially marked the end of the road for the development of Python 2.7.

Python 2.7 reached the end-of-life on 1^st January 2020 and will no longer receive any security updates.

Following the end of Python 2.7, the development team will now be able to focus entirely on Python 3 in efforts to increase the speed of its development and bug fixes.

The Python development team had announced the end of life for Python 2.7 in September last year.

"We are volunteers who make and take care of the Python programming language. We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can," the team said at that time.

They had originally planned to retire Python 2.7 in 2015, but then decided to push it to 2020.

In August, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned organisations running Python 2 applications to update within months or risk WannaCry-style cyber attacks.

Python 2.0 was released in 2000 and has been used by developers, security professional and administrators for nearly two decades

In 2008, the Python Software Foundation released Python 3 in order to redesign the language and to fix various flaws that affected Python 2. But, the Foundation continued to support Python 2.7 as well, considering the high volumes of users who still preferred to use the older version.

As Python 2.7 finally reaches the end of life, the development team is advising users to switch to Python 3 as soon as possible, which would enable them to receive important updates. User who don't upgrade to Python 3 won't find many volunteers to help fix catastrophic security problems in Python 2, or in software written in Python 2, the development team warned.

Such users will also lose chances to use good tools that run only on Python 3.

According to BleepingComputer, users who need to continue uysing Python 2.7 for some time and don't wish to upgrade their scripts/applications could use PyPy, which will continue to support Python 2.7 after 1^st January 2020, although it may not be fully compatible as third-party developers update their libraries to support Python 3.