Ask HN: Why all the hate for Python 3?

Because developers from cultures whose languages can be fully satisfied with the Latin-1 charset (which is the absolute majority in the developed world) don't get how important and essential Unicode is. But things are changing to better now, thankfully.

If you are a beginner, choosing Python 3 is a no brainer.

One of the main reasons for all the hate towards Python 3 is because it is not backwards compatible with Python 2. So people who have a lot invested in Python 2 have to port the codebase to Python 3. Another issue is that some libraries have not been ported to Python 3. This is becoming less of an issue as all the major libraries have been ported to Python 3.

Anything Zed Shaw says (or anyone for that matter), cross check the facts before drawing conclusions.

>Guido has already said that Python 3 is the future of the language and development on Python 2 will come to an end.

That doesn't mean anything. Beyond a certain point a language is beyond the control of its original creator.

I even heard a joke: Python 2 = North Korea Python 3 = South Korea

Except Swift 2 to Swift 3 has a good start, breaking as much source compatibility as they could is a great choice when the language is still young.

PHP 5.6 adopted UTF8 by default for security and Python 2 is mature and solve many problems in the past, I would say most programmers are lazy writing test suite as well.

You should start with Python 3 or Swift 3, both are a fine language for the modern world.

Don't worry about them, loud minority. Zed Shaw's book, (I've read it) does rub people the wrong way in many communities. Don't worry about it, mostly it got ad hominem over the years (think Phil Fish). Just focus on your studies and to hell with the rest.

People arguing about other's technical choices in computing are just children grown to size L anyway. What do you care what others go their work with? There Is No One Good Way.

The only reason why I still use Python2.7.x instead of 3 is because I occasionally use old libraries/dependencies that have not yet been ported to python 3.x

Python 2.7 is about to "Expire" though, https://pythonclock.org/

But as a newcomer, it depends on what you are doing, if your tooling is already python 3.x compatible, then I see no reason to stick with 2.7x

In large part because python 3 just wasn't worth using for the first few (probably five or six) years. The big reason so many of us use python is because of the wide range of libraries and modules that no longer worked.

And when selling it to people, it was usually "Oh, just do X, Y, and Z and you can port this library to Python 3". Not to mention all of the "Just write your python scripts to be backwards compatible".

So, as a user, I saw no reason to push it. A lot of hassle to not even really take advantage of anything to stay backwards compatible. And the moment we found a library that wasn't ported, we were back to 2.x.

Not to mention the zealots who would then explain to me how I was horribly wrong and that my firm is wrong and that we are bad people and blah blah blah blah blah.

These days it is a much easier sell in terms of compatibility as most (not all) major libraries have migrated. My personal work tends to be in python 3 and we try to make our in-house tools work for both (but 2.x is the priority). But most of our users are still going to use 2.x simply because there is no compelling reason to migrate (even if the migration is "Put parentheses after 'print'").

And the zealots are still annoying as hell.

And if 2.x really stops getting supported? I hope we'll migrate to 3, but there will be a lot of research and soul-searching first. Because now there are other languages with similar capabilities and if we are going to have to teach everyone something new, we might as well do it right.

Lots of library maintainers can't be arsed to put parentheses around their print statements (and perform the occasional slight change to other behaviors), or to run any of the automated tools that perform these compatibility-preserving changes. As a result, libraries maintained by these stubborn lazy people are not usable on python3, which makes beginners (who don't have a clear understanding of how these libraries are written and how easy it would be for them to perform the conversions themselves, because they still believe that "professionals" have some magic power other than the willingness to be persistent) wary of doing anything in python3.

It's very straightforward to write code that works in python 2 and python 3, and anyone learning python for the first time should be learning to write in that way. Ultimately, many of the compatibility changes are making things that have long been possible but considered poor style / bad habits no longer possible when doing so made the language easier to understand and behaviors more predictable (think print statement vs print function), or streamlining things that were originally bolted-on (think unicode).

As few others have said, Python3 still does not have full support for popular libraries from Python2. Yes, it is getting there but not yet. For example, according to this site [0], Carbon is not supported by Python3 yet.

[0] http://py3readiness.org/

Zed Shaw's position is that Python 3 is not suitable for the intended audience of Learn Python the Hard Way. His rationales (along with his response to criticism) was laid out a recent essay: https://zedshaw.com/2016/11/24/the-end-of-coder-influence/

Anyway, Zed Shaw is, in my opinion, worth paying attention to. This essay seems particularly relevant to the current kertuffle: https://web.archive.org/web/20120821234313/http://learncodet...

Why do people like any language? In the case of Python it wasn't that the syntax was the best syntax ever and the way it did object oriented programming was the best. It was that it came with so much pre-existing functionality ("batteries included").

So now there is an improved version called Python 3. OK, now we get into a discussion of why it is improved. That causes the always divisive discussion of how people should be programming.

IMHO the biggest problem with Python 3 is the Unicode stuff. The world seems to be moving toward just using UTF-8 for everything. The approach taken by Python 3 seems pointlessly complex and inefficient at this point in time.

> Guido has already said that Python 3 is the future of the language and development on Python 2 will come to an end.

Eventually Python 2 will come to end. He issued this statement in the past and it didn't happen on the timeline he had hoped. At PyCon this year an extended life for Python 2 was announced, until 2020 IIRC.