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Comment by StreakyCobra | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: What are the reasons people are still preferring Python2 over Python3? (No troll intended)

Probably momentum? The only reason is if they are supporting an app that they don't want to move to 3. As a professional Python dev, I can see no other reason. All my new projects are in 3, and as far as I'm concerned, the debate was settled years ago (and there wasn't much of a debate anyway.

On most OSes, open a terminal and type 'python', and you get a python2 REPL. That's reason enough to write a lot of scripty admin / automation stuff in python2. And then if you need to extend that, it's easy to just continue on in python2. It's there, it works, it's stable, you don't have to maintain versions in case of security issues, the OS package does it for you.

It's high time to change that default. I'm glad django will not support Python2 after 2020, making clear it's legacy.

Oh absolutely. There's a few linux distros starting to ship python3 by default, which is great. It's happening far too slowly.

Speaking of speed, I hear 3.7 should finally be able to beat 2.7 for most benchmarks, which is pretty sweet.

To give another example, Ubuntu is moving towards Python 3 by default, the plan is to have it as the only pre-installed Python version by 18.04 LTS, which is only a year away.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python

There's a reason the python command points to Python 2: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/#id16 It is anticipated that there will eventually come a time where the third party ecosystem surrounding Python 3 is sufficiently mature for this recommendation to be updated to suggest that the python symlink refer to python3 rather than python2 .

You can also open a terminal and type 'python3', and get a Python 3 REPL.

I only learned recently that it's a compatibility decision that means that plain 'python' will always be Python 2. However, you're starting to see Python 3 distributed right alongside it in most recent distros.

No reason per se. Just that lots of people have lots of Python2 code and feel that Python3 doesn't offer anything interesting enough to make it worthwhile to go through the effort of porting their code.

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