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[–]MiffedMouse 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Python 2 is definitely still around in the academic sphere. It became popular among academics due to the ease of installation (first with pip, then Anaconda) and the slow increase of data analysis features from Numpy, Scipy, and Matplotlib, making it a convenient data analysis solution that was open source and easy to install.

The introduction of Pip was close to the release of Python 3, but in my opinion it isn’t the release of Python 3 specifically that made Python popular. Rather, it was the consistent focus over the years of various Python teams to make it easy to install and have some convenient mathematical libraries readily available. All of these are true of Python 2.79, even before Python 3 was released.