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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

The majority of the Python programmers I know still use Python 2 for new projects.

Out of curiosity, how recently have you touched on that?

I was one of them until the last couple of months. I think moving to 3 now makes sense, and it's pain-free in my experience.

In 2016 I hadn't made the move yet. And as recently as a couple of months ago, sometimes py2 was still the choice (for instance, Amazon Lambda didn't support 3 yet).

And Google Appengine is stuck on Python 2.

I don't believe this for a minute.

Sure, lots of Enterprise apps use Python 2 because that was what they could build with.

I'm a Python developer and I don't know anyone who doesn't use Python 3 by default.

I understand this is purely anecdotal, but it seems outlandish to say that Python devs mostly use Python 2.

This is still anecdotical, but most python developers I know would chose py2 if given the choice. It's what they know, and they don't want to change semantics even if it's just changing how you write prints.

Counter-anecdote: Not a single developer I know wants to touch Python 2 after trying to get Django to work reliably with Unicode.

Then again, if your language is completely representable with US-ASCII, you might not have experienced the pain caused by having to unit test pretty much all string operations in your code.

> I understand this is purely anecdotal, but it seems outlandish to say that Python devs mostly use Python 2.

Then I guess it's a good thing I didn't say that. I said the majority of the ones I know use it.

I like to trot out this link whenever this comes up [1].

[1]: https://semaphoreci.com/blog/2016/11/11/python-versions-used...

the only devs I know that use python2 are ones that stuck having to do so because no one has put the legwork in to port a library over to py3.

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