The Incredible Growth of Python (stackoverflow.blog)

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 1:42 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> students learning Python *today* ... they're learning Python 3.
>
> I'm not so sure of that.  I do know a few people currently learning
> Python, and they're using Python 2.

Why? Unless they're going to be maintaining a Py2 codebase, why should
they learn the older version with less features?

At Thinkful (shameless plug[1]), students learn Python 3 almost
exclusively (we do have a data science course in which students learn
either or both, but in the web dev course, it's definitely Py3). I
haven't had anyone run into difficulties with annotations/type hints
(we don't teach them, so how would they be bothered?), print being a
function (everything else is a function so it's no surprise that print
is too), etc, and even the text/bytes split is only a problem when
students are working with non-ASCII data files provided by third
parties, at which point they have to learn about encoding="...". Now,
I just need to convince people to stop putting "first name" and
"surname" fields on their web forms [2], and things will be about
perfect...

ChrisA

[1] I teach via www.thinkful.com. My views are my own, not that of my employer.
[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/