Python 3.x adoption

[beliavsky at aol.com]

On Tuesday, January 14, 2014 2:38:29 PM UTC-5, Skip Montanaro wrote:
> > What's the problem with Python 3.x? It was first released in 2008, but
> 
> > web hosting companies still seem to offer Python 2.x rather.
> 
> >
> 
> > For example, Google App Engine only offers Python 2.7.
> 
> >
> 
> > What's wrong?...
> 
> 
> 
> What makes you think anything's wrong? Major changes to any
> 
> established piece of software takes a fairly long while to infiltrate.
> 
> Lots of COBOL and Fortran 77 still running out there.

I don't think the Fortran analogy is valid.

The Fortran standards after F77 are almost complete supersets of F77, and Fortran compiler vendors handle even the deleted parts of F77, knowing their customer base. Therefore you do not need to rewrite old Fortran code to use it with Fortran 95 or 2003 compilers, and you can easily mix old-style and modern Fortran. Later Fortran standards did not invalidate basic syntax such as print statements, as Python 3 did. Python 2 and 3 are incompatible in ways that do not apply to Fortran standards pre- and post- F77.