In article <[email protected]>,
Antti J Ylikoski <[email protected]> wrote:
> I have in my hands the O'Reilly book by Mark Lutz, Programming
> Python, in two versions: the 2nd Edition, which covers Python 2, and
> the 4th edition, which covers Python 3.
The engineer in me really has to wonder what the 3rd edition might have
covered :-)
> I would not want to invest such an amount of work and time to an
> obsolete language (i. e. Python 2).
I think the best that can be said for Python 2 is, "It's not dead yet!".
The vast majority of production Python code written today is for 2.x,
for x in {5, 6, 7}. The biggest thing that's holding back adoption of 3
is that most of the major packages don't support 3 yet (but I saw an
announcement just this morning that django has been ported to 3).
I predict that 2012 will be the year of Python-3. I expect we're at the
point now that all major packages will either get ported to 3 in the
next year or two, or become abandonware. Also, people building new
packages will come out with versions for both 2 and 3 if they want their
stuff to get widely adopted.
> What is the opinion of the wizards here, shall I learm Python 2 or
> Python 3? I'm posting this here because I feel that this point is
> interesting to other students of Python.
The difficult thing here is that you are living on the cusp. If you
came back and asked that question in a couple of years, I strongly
suspect the answer would be, "Don't bother with 2; 3 is what everybody
uses today". But, we're not there quite yet. Learn 2.
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