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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

A very clear post on the future of the Python language that should probably be sung from mountain-tops in addition to being said in this blog post. Or at the very least, stated on every download page of the latest 2.x releases on python.org.

I still wonder about the rate of 3.x adoption will be, though. My university (RPI) still had Python 2.4 on all the CS machines last year, which made some minor things (I wish I could remember one!) a bit frustrating.

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I also wonder how Django not adopting it for a while is going to affect the transition as well. I realize a lot of other things are in play but Django is a big one I think.

Django has a roadmap at least.

As far as I know, we're doing what the Python dev team expected for large projects: taking some time to deprecate older 2.x releases, working our way toward being 2.6- or 2.7-only, then porting from there.

Nobody who actually paid attention to the Python 3 process expected this to happen quickly, or is under the impression that large projects are taking longer than expected to port.

Django will be a tricky beast to port due to the fairly large ecosystem.

For my web projects, I almost always use at least django, fabric, djang_extensions and django_piston. If even one of these is unavailable, I'm sticking to 2.7. I use other django libs as well, and python 3 doesn't offer me enough features to make losing those libraries worthwhile.

It's not like Djangonauts are against moving to 3.x it will happen, and probably sooner/faster than you think.

As for universities upgrading, it's like people who still use Windows XP and IE6. Most people have already upgraded but the long tail will stick around for a long time for no discernible reason.

I watched the last panel where the Django core team talked. It didn't sound like it would sooner/faster than I thought it would. It will happen is about all they said.

ReportLab is another "key piece" that stops a lot of developers from writing python 3.X

Inline-if type things don't work; I keep having to rewrite my scripts for older pythons.

  var = 2 if something else 4

They're upgraded the servers to 2.5.2 at some point :)

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