Python 2.x and 3.x usage survey

[John Ladasky]

I responded to the survey about a week ago.  Dan, I hope you will share the results with us soon.  I also tried to reply to this thread, but I lost the ability to post to newsgroups for about a week.  It seems to have been restored, so I will try again.

My transition from Py2 to Py3 is implicitly documented in several posts here on comp.lang.python.  I switched over to Py3 about a year ago, and I'm not looking back.  I couldn't move to Py3 until numpy and matplotlib were ported.  But once that was done, the advantages outweighed the costs, and I switched.

Changing over has not been painless.  I'm doing without wxPython for now, my favorite GUI.  I know that Phoenix is coming to take wxPython's place.  Meanwhile, I'm willing to be sold on any other Linux- and Py3-compatible GUI -- besides TKinter, that is.  

I also miss psyco.  I had a lot of Py2 code which made very little use of dynamic typing.  Psyco accelerated it nicely.  I believe that that a lot of my Py3 code would also benefit from JIT compilation.

Finally, I have encountered some small mental hurdles concerning Unicode.  I am teaching a Silicon Valley test engineer Python on the side.  His task is to implement an automated device testing suite over a telnet connection.  We have to remember to convert between the remote device's expectation of strings of bytes, and Python's expectation of strings of Unicode characters.  When we forget, there can be bugs.  I'm sure that I'll get used to it eventually.