[Python-Dev] Python 3 migration status update across some key subcommunities (was Re: 2.7 is here until 2020, please don't call it a waste.) (original) (raw)
Florian Bruhin me at the-compiler.org
Sun May 31 16:44:30 CEST 2015
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- Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> [2015-06-01 00:15:01 +1000]:
On 31 May 2015 at 19:07, Ludovic Gasc <gmludo at gmail.com> wrote: > About Python 3 migration, I think that one of our best control stick is > newcomers, and by extension, Python trainers/teachers. > If newcomers learn first Python 3, when they will start to work > professionally, they should help to rationalize the Python 3 migration > inside existing dev teams, especially because they don't have an interest > conflict based on the fact that they haven't written plenty of code with > Python 2. > 2020 is around the corner, 5 years shouldn't be enough to change the > community mind, I don't know.
The education community started switching a while back - if you watch Carrie-Anne Philbin's PyCon UK 2014 keynote, one of her requests for the broader Python community was for everyone else to just catch up already in order to reduce student's confusion (she phrased it more politely than that, though). Educators need to tweak examples and exercises to account for a version switch, but that's substantially easier than migrating hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of production code. And yes, if you learn Python 3 first, subsequently encountering Python 2's quirks and cruft is likely to encourage folks that know both versions of the language to start advocating for a version upgrade :)
I think a big issue here is the lack of good newcomer tutorials for Python 3.
In the #python IRC channel, "learn Python the hard way"[1] is often recommended, and the common consensus seems to be that all other tutorials (other than the official one[2] which is clearly not aimed at newcomers to programming) seem to lack in some way.
LPTHW is Python 2 only, so at least from what I see in #python, many newcomers are recommended to learn Python 2 rather than 3 because of that.
I agree migrating large existing codebases (and developers) from 2 to 3 can be quite an issue, and a lot of energy went into making this easier (which is good!). But I also think nobody fresh to Python should start learning Python 2 now, except when there's a compelling reason (such as unported libraries without alternatives).
Florian
[1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ [2] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html
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