Python 2 vs Python 3 for teaching

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> We teach 3.4 (because that's what's available on the Ubuntu VMs that
>> we're recommending; anything 3.2+ will probably work just the same),
>> and that's it.
>
> The async keyword seems like one of Py3's bigger improvements and it
> makes its appearance in 3.5, iirc.

Yeah. Not currently available to us, since we're recommending (for
consistency) that students use the Cloud 9 browser-based IDE, but I'm
sure when Ubuntu's next LTS comes out, it'll include 3.5 (or maybe
3.6), so we'll start using that then.

Taking advantage of new features can be done as we decide they're safe
to use, without needing any backward compatibility breaks (apart from,
of course, the async/await code not working on older Pythons). Hmm.
Maybe this should be a workshop... that could be fun.

ChrisA