Python 3.x adoption

[Mark Lawrence]

On 17/01/2014 22:16, beliavsky at aol.com wrote:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>

A good choice to make, the capability to use "from __future__ import 
print_function", or whatever the actual thing is, has been available for 
years.  2to3 has been available for years, six was released at the end 
of June 2010 and there's now future, see http://python-future.org/
Admittedly there's a problem with the porting of code which mixes bytes 
and strings, but that's being addressed right now via PEPs 460, 461 and 
possibly others.

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask 
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence