Python 2 or 3

[Roy Smith]

In article <O3hCq.1112$Ci1.79 at uutiset.elisa.fi>,
 Antti J Ylikoski <antti.ylikoski at tkk.fi> wrote:

> I have in my hands the O'Reilly book by Mark Lutz, Programming 
> Python, in two versions: the 2nd Edition, which covers Python 2, and 
> the 4th edition, which covers Python 3.

The engineer in me really has to wonder what the 3rd edition might have 
covered :-)

> I would not want to invest such an amount of work and time to an 
> obsolete language (i. e. Python 2).

I think the best that can be said for Python 2 is, "It's not dead yet!".  
The vast majority of production Python code written today is for 2.x, 
for x in {5, 6, 7}.  The biggest thing that's holding back adoption of 3 
is that most of the major packages don't support 3 yet (but I saw an 
announcement just this morning that django has been ported to 3).

I predict that 2012 will be the year of Python-3.  I expect we're at the 
point now that all major packages will either get ported to 3 in the 
next year or two, or become abandonware.  Also, people building new 
packages will come out with versions for both 2 and 3 if they want their 
stuff to get widely adopted.

> What is the opinion of the wizards here, shall I learm Python 2 or
> Python 3?  I'm posting this here because I feel that this point is
> interesting to other students of Python.

The difficult thing here is that you are living on the cusp.  If you 
came back and asked that question in a couple of years, I strongly 
suspect the answer would be, "Don't bother with 2; 3 is what everybody 
uses today".  But, we're not there quite yet.  Learn 2.