"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 7:32 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav <at> gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 3:29 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis <at> pitrou.net>
> wrote:
>> > People don't use? According to available figures, there are more
> downloads of
>> > Python 3 than downloads of Python 2 (Windows installers, mostly):
>> > http://www.python.org/webstats/
>> >
>>
>> Unfortunately, that has a massive inherent bias, because there are
>> Python builds available in most Linux distributions - and stats from
>> those (like Debian's popcon) will be nearly as useless, because a lot
>> of them will install one or the other (probably 2.x) without waiting
>> for the user (so either they'll skew in favour of the one installed,
>> or in favour of the one NOT installed, because that's the only one
>> that'll be explicitly requested). It's probably fairly accurate for
>> Windows stats, though, since most people who want Python on Windows
>> are going to come to python.org for an installer.
>
> Agreed, but it's enough to rebut the claim that "people don't use
> Python 3". More than one million Python 3.3 downloads per month under
> Windows is a very respectable number (no 2.x release seems to reach
> that level).

Sure. The absolute number is useful; I just don't think the relative
number is - you started by talking about there being "more downloads
of Python 3 than downloads of Python 2", and it's that comparison that
I think is unfair. But the absolute numbers are definitely
significant. I'm not quite sure how to interpret the non-link lines in
[1] but I see the month of December showing roughly 1.2 million Python
3.3.3 downloads for Windows - interestingly, split almost fifty-fifty
between 64-bit and 32-bit installs - and just over one million Python
2.7.6 installs. That's one month, two million installations of Python.
That's 73,021 *per day* for the month of December. That is a lot of
Python.

ChrisA

[1] http://www.python.org/webstats/usage_201312.html#TOPURLS