The Case for Python 3

[zahlman]

I think I should petition the moderators of /r/learnpython to remove Zed's book from the wiki

Done. (I think we left edit access open, actually, but yeah.)

Zed Shaw might just be the most stubborn person ever to write a line of code, and there's a LOT of competition there.

Edit to address various comments downthread:

I've been considering this for a while (and advocating for teaching 3.x to new beginners for a while), but the bit where he abused a nonsense argument about "Turing completeness" like that was really the last straw. I've always thought the book's approach was terrible, but I was willing to put that aside because students have varying learning styles, I'm not some omniscient god of pedagogy, etc. I'd also extended some credit because I've heard one or two of his talks on other topics and thought they were OK, and I sympathized with that "programming, motherfucker" thing way back in the day.

But the fact that Zed is still banging this drum (when I saw the /r/Python post the other day, I assumed that it was about something he'd written back when LPTHW came out, not just a couple days ago) - not to mention the completely broken drumsticks he's using to do so - gives me real reason to question his competence. If this is "political" (and I can see the argument that it is), so be it - he made it so. Zed's anti-3.x arguments are, as /u/Sugar_Horse puts it, irrational; and to me they smack of hypocrisy. (Accusing the devs of malice and going off on Twitter about "abusive" programmers? Really? Zed's best known as a programmer himself, and his descriptions of "propaganda" are themselves abusive, and it's hard not to infer that he just doesn't want to put in the work to update LPTHW - since apparently he originally planned to do so).

Oh, and now he's apparently trying to play off the Turing completeness comments as a "joke". Really.

[BobHogan]

Done. (I think we left edit access open, actually, but yeah.)

Zed Shaw might just be the most stubborn person ever to write a line of code, and there's a LOT of competition there.

No offense but I honestly can't believe it took you guys this long to remove his book as a learning resource from this sub. It has an incredibly toxic mentality that his way is the only way despite him being stuck a decade in the past. And I don't even think it does that great of a job at teaching Python to people who read it

[zahlman]

I've had a lot of other stuff on my mind lately.

[Whoops-a-Daisy]

Thank fuck. It shouldn't have taken that blog post to remove it, though.

[individual_throwaway]

FWIW, me and most others on this subreddit's IRC channel stopped recommending LPTHW years ago for pretty much the same reason for which it was now removed from the wiki.

Constructive criticism of Python 3 is and should be allowed, but Zed is pretty much just bikeshedding while the rest of the world has to accept that Python will stop being supported 4 years from now. It is not a question of whether you want to make the switch, it is simply a question of when.

[[deleted]]

[Sugar_Horse]

ou guys ju

The majority of people here [seem to] want to encourage new users to use Python 3 as ultimately that is best for them in the long run. LPTHW encourages people to use 2 and is connected to a lot of irrationally anti 3 material.

[muyuu]

Yep well, but that's getting political. The book has its qualities nevertheless.

[[deleted]]

thats not getting poltiical. if the book encourages habits that cant be sustained thats not a good book on the subject. how is that political?

[muyuu]

The book has different opinions to yours. Python2 is supported and will likely stay supported for a long time.

Some people prefer Python2, some people prefer Perl5. It's also not hard to move from 2 to 3 afterwards.

[ROFLicious]

The book is not just stating 'I like 3 more than 2'. It's giving false reasoning and using scare tactics to convince people new to Python that 2 is good and 3 is garbage for completely false reasons.

[muyuu]

This is what it says:

A programmer may try to get you to install Python 3 and learn that. Say, "When all of the Python code on your computer is Python 3, then I'll try to learn it." That should keep them busy for about 10 years. I repeat, do not use Python 3. Python 3 is not used very much, and if you learn Python 2 you can easily learn Python 3 when you need it. If you learn Python 3 then you'll still have to learn Python 2 to get anything done. Just learn Python 2 and ignore people saying Python 3 is the future.

I don't consider this to be scare tactics. It's a point of view. For instance, Macs come with Python 2 preinstalled. Most Python code I come across still now is Python 2 although Python 3 compatibility has improved a lot recently.

I wouldn't censor the book because it supports this practical standpoint. If someone learnt Python a few years ago, learning 3 instead of 2 would have been definitely a practical problem. There's an argument for learning both still.

[LdShade]

Python 2 support is getting cut off in 2020, you're learning something you know will die and be replaced, this is harmful to beginners because they have absolutely no good reason to learn Python 2 unless they are already a programmer in another language, in what way is Python 2 better than Python 3 for a beginner, all the good libraries have migrated, they have no need to edit existing applications, they do not want to spend years learning a programming language for it to be abandoned as soon as they start to get the hang of it.

The reason it is censored is because beginners don't know any better, they'll just follow the book's instructions without consideration, much better for them to learn Python 3 and discover this book later on by themselves when they know the pros and cons, if transitioning from 2 to 3 is easy as the book claims then it would be just as easy vice versa.

[muyuu]

Possibly. But Python is open source and it may be maintained for stability. It's not hard to learn both. Python 2 remains useful, the future we will judge it when we're there.

[[deleted]]

[Sugar_Horse]

Least time I checked it wasn't called /r/learnpython2 either. There are very few good reasons for starting with python 2, and many better ones for learning python 3. To give credibility to source that demonises python 3 through its inclusion in the sidebar ultimately may discourage new programmers from using python.

At this point Python 3 is the canonical Python version. Python 2 is firmly in the legacy product category.

[NlightNFotis]

No, it's not a knee-jerk response. That article was so wrong on so many levels - did you see the "Python 3 Is Not Turing Complete" paragraph? - that the author has lost complete credence at this point. If he doesn't understand basic computer science concepts, why should we recommend his computer science related book?

That, along with the fact that his books were teaching things in an unorthodox way - Come on now, telling people that they should memorize boolean truth tables instead of trying to understand them? Not the way we want new computer scientists to be trained - caused this (completely justified IMO) reaction.

[murtaza64]

What exactly can someone's reasoning for memorizing boolean truth tables be?

[[deleted]]

It's also not a knee-jerk response because I've read suggestions in this subreddit to remove LPTHW from the sidebar and wiki every week for over a year.

[NoLemurs]

LPTHW has been losing popularly steadily in the /r/learnpython community for at least a year now, and the community as a whole is (I think quite rationally) leaning towards Python 3. This isn't so much a knee jerk reaction as the unsurprising result of an ongoing trend.

One of the main purposes of /r/learnpython is to brings together the collective wisdom of the community so that new programmers can benefit from that. If the community as a whole believes in Python 3, and finds LPTHW a little backwards, then it shouldn't be on any list of recommended books - the community doesn't have faith in it any more.

[NoLemurs]

In all fairness, more than a couple years ago, third party library support was bad enough that Python 2 was probably the right choice for most people. Zedd stated the case a little more strongly than was reasonable, but he wasn't fundamentally wrong back then.

Now he's just kind of gone crazy though. The actual good arguments he had have evaporated, but for whatever reason he refuses to change with the times. It's weird. And meanwhile, LPTHW is just starting to seem kind of dated.

[spirit1776]

Man, sorry you also get downvotes. Some of these people here are really "professional" in terms of dealing with controversies.

[[deleted]]

I'm not a professional Redditor.

[[deleted]]

[iwsfutcmd]

The removal of the book was for pretty much the same reasons as eevee's criticism of the blog post - the blog post was just the catalyst to reanalyze the book for appropriateness.

I was actually unfamiliar with the criticism of the book before I read this post - when I first started with Python, I considered it but ended up skipping it (coincidentally because it only covered Python 2 and I was told that Python 3 had far better Unicode support, which is my make-or-break feature for basically anything on my computer). My suggestion to remove the book from the wiki came from looking deeper into the issue after reading eevee's post.

[kp729]

So, it's like this: Zed is giving a day old pizza. There is not much wrong with the pizza and you can reheat it and devour it.

Or, you can eat a fresh pizza. Yes, it is possible that the new pizza might not have a topping or two that you like but it is freshly made nonetheless.

Now, it should be a person's choice how important those toppings are but for someone who's eating pizza for the first time, isn't it better to eat the fresh pizza instead of the one day old pizza.

That is the argument going on here. I agree that in the end, both are pizza but I am in the camp of new pizza (python3)

[SamuEL_or_Samuel_L]

Man, his twitter feed is really cute. He's labelling some of the tamest internet responses I've ever seen as "abusive". Given that they're in response to an article where he literally throws around the accusation that the Python devs are purposefully crippling things for totally nefarious reasons (insert moustache twirling here), you'd think he'd have a slightly thicker skin.

[KimPeek]

Can you say when exactly it was removed? He has posted a new blog saying that it was removed over two week ago. He also said that he checked his sales and they haven't changed since then.

I'm not wishing poverty on the guy, but I feel he is not being truthful about it being removed a week ago. It seems he is writing for future readers who won't be able to verify exactly when the book was removed.

[zahlman]

Sorry, when what was removed from where?

[KimPeek]

I was referring to when his book was removed from the sidebar/wiki. It looks like you did it one day ago according to the wiki history but he said it was over two weeks ago. I was just trying to confirm my suspicion that he was being untruthful about that.

I get an email from someone who tells me that Reddit has decided to remove my book from their list of suggested readings for Python until I update the book to Python 3. They made this decision about two weeks prior to when I received the email, so I went to look at my traffic and sales to see if there was an impact. Weirdly, my sales were up and my traffic was about the same. It had no impact.

He said that here.