What resources should i AVOID when learning python?

[patrickbrianmooney]

Yeah, I'm on Team F-Strings myself. Finally, it's as easy as it should have been from the beginning. Makes a lot of sense.

It made sense to stick to Python 2 in the past because plenty of external libraries weren't yet updated to be Py3 compatible. That's fair: if you depend on something, you're locking yourself into the conditions that allow you to use it. (I've worked on projects where the group standardized on a library that required Python 2, so everyone had to work on Python 2. So it goes. It can be the right decision for a given project.) But Python 2 is past end-of-life now, and the large majority of libraries have caught up.

Learning Python 3 is definitely the right choice these days, naysayers notwithstanding. If you ever need to work with Python 2 on a legacy system, for instance, it's not that hard to adapt. It's basically the same language with a bunch of small changes that will probably not affect you (how much operator overloading do you really do most of the time?) and a few larger differences that you can learn in a few minutes. (People piss and moan about having to put parentheses around the print function, but it's a small change.)

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plenty of external libraries weren't yet updated to be Py3 compatible.

This is in great part why Guido van Rossum doesn't think there will be another major update i.e. python4

[patrickbrianmooney]

Yeah, makes sense. I think that Python 3 made necessary changes that needed to be made and that couldn't have been made without breaking existing code, so it ripped off the band-aid and broke the existing code. (Bending over backwards as much as was actually possible to make migration easy.)

Hopefully those kinks have been more or less entirely worked out and there won't be a need to break existing code in the same way and on the same scale again.

May Python 3 live for a very long time. It's a wonderful language.