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Comment by kayman | Hacker News Reader

Python was one of the first languages I've tried I actually enjoyed programming in.

I hope to continue leveraging my investment in learning python by using it for a long time. So far I haven't been forced to use Python 3. I've tried a few times but always found it easier to just go back to python (2.7).

I figure eventually I have to use Python 3 but at this point, my life has been fine without upgrading to python3.

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As a writer of "quick n' dirty" webapps for internal use, I use python3 because philosophically, I want to help the world move forward, and the standard library has more stuff in it.

Ditto. I have submitted at least 10 PRs to fix Python3 bugs in OSS projects directly because of this. So perhaps I have made the world .000001% better.

Thank you!

What did you find difficult about Python 3?

I switched around 3.1, though granted I was still a novice programmer then and didn't have to port any legacy code. I had so many issues with Unicode in Python 2 (some may have been my own ignorance at the time, but with 3 a lot of those issues magically disappeared). Since text processing / NLP is my main focus, it was an easy decision to switch.

I think Python is amazing to get small stuff ip and running and quick scripts, but it quickly becomes a nightmare as the project scales up.

Why would you say that? The main Python project I work on is 271k LOC... no problems here.

The lack of type checking makes it much harder to coordinate right inputs and outputs. Doable, but makes the overhead much harder than when you do have it.

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