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Comment by arthulia | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't windows have a standard windows installer for python? Why are we still teaching beginners Python 2.7? What is wrong with python 3?

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There's still many popular libraries that haven't been ported over. Django has recently been taken off the list but PIL, paramiko (and by extension, fabric) and other libraries that a beginner might see mentioned on python tutorials are still not ready. I recently gave python 3 another try and had to switch back to 2.7 pretty quickly.

I'm starting to think that if a library won't switch to Python 3 then it's time for the library to die and people move on to a new library that offers similar functionality and does work on Python 3.

For example, PIL doesn't support Python 3, but there's a GraphicsMagick wrapper [1] which does. Graphics Magick is more functional anyway.

You may have time invested in PIL and other Python 2 libraries, but newbies don't, and there's no reason to start them off on a dying version of the language. It's contributing to the chicken and egg problem that's holding Python back.

[1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pgmagick/0.5.5

Most widely-used libraries have not actually switched to Python 3, they just support it using 2to3.

Someone who only knows Python 3 would have a hard time hacking on the source code of most libraries.

re PIL. It's "friendly fork"/successor pillow does support python 3.x https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow/2.0.0

They explain why at the end of the article. See: "A note on Python versions"

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