[ctpug] Introducing Kids to Programming: 2 or 3?

[Simon Cross]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Marco Gallotta <marco at gallotta.co.za> wrote:
> We received a grant from Google to reach 1,000 kids in South Africa
> with our course in 2011. People have also shown interest in running
> the course in Croatia, Poland and Egypt. We're also eyeing developing
> African countries in the long-term. As such, we're taking the time now
> to write our very own specialised course notes and exercises, and we
> this is why we need to decide *now* which path to take: 2 or 3? As we
> will be translating the notes we'll probably stick with out choice for
> the next few years.

If you were going to start running the course tomorrow I'd suggest
sticking with Python 2. Python 3 ports are rapidly becoming available
but few have had the bugs shaken out of them yet. In three or four
months I expect that the important bugs will have been dealt with.
Given that 2.x will not receive any new features, I think it is
effectively dead.

I would explicitly mention the existence of 2.7 and 3.2 [1] to
students (perhaps near the end of the first day or whenever they're
about to go off and download Python for themselves).

One caveat is that web applications may only start to migrate to 3.x
late next year. There are a number of reasons for this. First it's not
yet clear what form the WSGI standard will take under Python 3 (and if
3.2 is released before this decision is made it will effectively have
to wait for 3.3 to be included).  Secondly the software stack involved
is quite deep in some places. For example, database support might
require porting MySQLdb, then SQLAlchemy, then the web framework and
only after that the web application itself.

[1] Which should hopefully make it out before 2011. :)

Schiavo
Simon