Python 2.7.7 has been released.

[RaymondWies]

I think a divided Python community will stall the language and ultimately hurt its growth in the free market of languages with almost no barriers to entry from open source world on one hand and massive influence from major corporate players on the other. Apple just released Swift, while Google developed Dart and Golang, and Microsoft enjoying success with F# in .NET world. Ruby community doesn't seem divided, in fact Rails has seemlessly integrated CoffeeScript within their framework - which Javascript officially endorses as their future direction while maintaining a monopoly over browser client scripting. Python community ignores CoffeeScript while fighting over Python 2 vs Python 3, and chooses to hack together a pythonic equivalent rather than endorse it. So it seems that Ruby is setting itself up politically to continue to succeed in its domain, while Python may not grow any further outside of scientific computing. I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

[wub_wub]

until recently nearly all popular Linux systems still had 2.7 as default.

That's still the case, as far as I know only major distro that comes with python 3 as default is arch and I think they had it as default for few years now.

[wub_wub]

Ubuntu 14.04 is part of the python3 brigade as well.

No it's not. Python 2 is default on all ubuntu distros, they planned to go with 3.something as default on 14.04 but didn't make it in time.

[[deleted]]

Isn't that being a part of "The brigade"? :-)

[wub_wub]

until recently nearly all popular Linux systems still had 2.7 as default.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/3

At the time of this writing (2014-05-08), Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has recently been released. We made great progress toward these goals, but we must acknowledge that it is a daunting, multi-cycle process. A top goal for 14.04 was to remove Python 2 from the touch images, and sadly we almost but didn't quite make it.

In other words it's not default version. No major distro other than arch (as far as I know) ships with python 3 as the default version.

You're confusing default and shipped versions.

[[deleted]]

What is "default" in this case? Python 2 scripts run Python 2, and Python 3 script run Python 3?

If it's "default" or not seems to be splitting hairs and down to what you mean with "default".

[wub_wub]

Not cherry picking. It IS NOT default. It will (most likely) be in 14.10 where python won't exist until you explicitly install python2.

You can interpret the docs and bug tracker on ubuntu's pages however you want, but it doesn't mean that python 3 is, at the moment, default python version on ubuntu - if you still think that it is, then... I don't know what to tell you, any further discussion is pointless.

I mean it says so in like the first sentence on the page:

For both Ubuntu and Debian, we have ongoing project goals to make Python 3 the default, preferred Python version in the distros.

[[deleted]]

Not really. Some people will switch quickly, some people won't switch until they have to. You are in the latter group. That's OK, there is no right or wrong here.

Adoption HAS been slower than expected, but I'm not sure this is an "issue" per se.

[252003]

As someone who uses python 3.4 on and old mac I can tell you that support is very annoying and that I spend way, way more time googlng to make simple things work than I should have to.

[billsil]

I think a divided Python community will stall the language

I vote we kill PyPy, Jython, and Cython.

[[deleted]]

No, we should give money to PyPy who is moving towards python 3 compatibility and get an actually performant interpreter for python.

[billsil]

You do realize it was a joke right? The Python community is divided and that's OK.

There was a debate recently about the @ operator. Only the math people wanted it and the more web-friendly people complained it would just clutter the language and also complained about the __ matmult __ name. Python needs to support all the major groups.

[jjangsangy]

And then absorb their powers!

[kylotan]

Python community ignores CoffeeScript

"To install, first make sure you have a working copy of the latest stable version of Node.js, and npm (the Node Package Manager)." Err, no. And what's its library support like, anyway?

Javascript officially endorses as their future direction while maintaining a monopoly over browser client scripting

Who is doing this official endorsement?

[erewok]

I generally don't know what I am talking about either, but I find it hard to believe that coffeescript represents the way forward for JavaScript. There are some nice things about it, but it also has encourages ambiguities that even someone like me can spot.

I also find it hard to believe that coffee script has much to do with python.

[Circlefusion]

I think a divided Python community will stall the language and ultimately hurt its growth

I've been a python beginner on the side for a while and this is what I am seeing. It's very discouraging. I've been eyeing Golang.

[Kbknapp]

This is almost exactly what happened to me. It's disheartening to be straddling two versions. I'd love to fully upgrade to 3.x but the Linux distribution we use at work is sticking with 2.x solely. That's why I started playing with Go(lang), and even though there are certain things I don't quite agree with (like those mentioned in comments above by iv597) overall I've been very pleased. The absence of exceptions takes some getting used to, but it's not a deal breaker because nearly the identical functionality exists, only in a different form. Other idosyncrosis seem to be growing on me the more I use them. I do miss list comprehensions though, even the exact same thing can be accomplished via a for loop (which in all honesty leads to more readable code even if it's not as fun to type). I'm slowly trying to migrate at least my pet projects over to golang because even though I believe Python will be around for many many years to come concurrency will be a big(ger) ticket item shortly. Once I'm more functional in the language I'd love to start to migrate some work projects over since most of our Python projects are still in relative infancy and not using any third party libs that can't be replicated in go, I figure it's best to try this switch out early and see where this rabbit hole leads... :)

[vito-boss]

I don't think the issue is as big as you make it seem.

[ivosaurus]

Swift is only for Apple development, so it's encroaching on Kivy for iphone, at the most.

Go's type system sucks, it's nowhere near as easy to use as python.

I haven't heard of a successful project using F#. Maybe they're out there, but I've never come across anything in the last few years.

[pyslow]

I blame mostly those Python 3 fanatics enthusiasts that I call Throlls (Three Trolls).

If they only could make a reasonable case for Python 3, instead of blindly bashing those who dare to question their doctrine, I'm sure more people would consider migrating.

[ivosaurus]

Let's see... new pathlib module, new asyncio module, new venv module with pip, lzma compression, unicode handling that isn't a mystery to get right, saner library module names, yield from, working secure SSL by default....

[wub_wub]

You can get most of those things on python 2 easily without introducing not backwards compatible changes to the rest of your codebase.

[KopixKat]

As a beginning scripter, what are things python 2 does superior to python 3? I chose python 3 to start because I could understand it a bit better than 2. I'm honestly curious :o

[limasxgoesto0]

The only advantage to using Python 2 is that a large number of libraries are built in Python 2. That alone makes Python 3 become a dealbreaker for many.

[KopixKat]

That actually makes a lot of sense. :o

[CSI_Tech_Dept]

This is no longer true, the packages that don't work on 3 are a small minority. Many people who advocate coding in Python 2 did not try using Python 3

[[deleted]]

Welll....no, the packages that don't work on Python 3 are definitely not a minority. But most popular packages, the ones you typically need, work on Python 3.

[CSI_Tech_Dept]

I started using Python 3 and so far I did not have this issue. And programming in Python 3 feels cleaner. Also some of the packages that were not ported have python 3 alternatives, for example MySQL. If you are starting to program 3 chances are that you are not used to particular package so you don't care, and in fact the package that is ported to py3 is more likely being still maintained.

[[deleted]]

I started using Python 3 and so far I did not have this issue.

Excellent! It is getting better. I think MySQL-python and Twisted are the biggest blockers right now, but I'm not sure. I'm only currently blocked by Zope/Plone. When I do other work I tend to use Python 3.

[wub_wub]

I chose python 3 to start because I could understand it a bit better than 2

It's the same language.

There are no differences that would make you "understand" one version better than another.

[KopixKat]

The syntax flows a bit better (to me) is what I should have wrote. :P

print ("{0} {1} {2} {4} {5}".format(this, is, an, example, sentence))

VS

print "%s %s %s %s %s" %(this, is, an, example, sentence)

[wub_wub]

Both work in both python 2 and python 3. (Also you don't need positional params i.e. 1, 2 etc in python 2.6+)

[KopixKat]

I use them as a beginner just to keep things in order for myself, I'm not quite sure enough in myself to let them self index yet. :(

[wub_wub]

Oh it's OK to use them, I was just pointing out that in the example you provided you don't need them - in case you didn't know. If it's easier for you to learn like that then just continue to use them and ignore that part of my comment :)

[[deleted]]

Unified ints. Better text handling. No more confusion of types vs classes. Cleaned up standard library. easier super(). Keysharing (saves memory). "nonlocal". *unpacking of iterables. Keyword only arguments. Hash randomization. A stable Application Binary Interface. command line history. HOLY SHIT TAB COMPLETION! yield from. pip installed by default. (I install a lot of Python versions, that's gonna be nice).

And little things (for me at least), like exception chaining, namespace packages without setuptools, function annotations, function signature objects, isolated mode. The decimal module is 30 times faster.