[SciPy-User] SciPy ecosystem and Python 3

[Matthew Brett]

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Thomas Kluyver <takowl at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 July 2013 07:47, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Please keep in mind that it's much more important to you, as an active dev
>> who cares about 3.x adoption, then to them. All newcomers are getting for
>> now is some compatibility issues and strings they don't understand. On the
>> upside they don't have to move a few years later, but the business case is
>> thin.
>
>
> I'm not just doing this to cheerlead Python 3 adoption. Many of us have seen
> newcomers being confused by the split. I don't have references handy, but
> I've heard about courses that have asked people to preinstall Python, and
> despite careful instructions, people have turned up with a mixture of Python
> 2 and Python 3, which then wastes valuable time while everyone gets to the
> same starting point. Discussion sites see regular 'should I use 2 or 3'
> threads. And it's easy to imagine potential users who're evaluating Python
> against alternative solutions, and get put off by the 2/3 split, though we
> probably don't hear from them.

Agreeing with Thomas:

Most of us when starting with a new software stack, look for the
latest version.  I guess this is because it's fun to use the latest
stuff, and because it's annoying learning habits for stuff that will
soon be deprecated or raise an error.

We could explain why that should not be the case for scientific
python, but I imagine that new users will be a little puzzled and
maybe worried that we should be holding to an old version so long
after the release of the new.

I do believe we should have slight bias towards 3 rather 2 for the
sake of the health of the overall python ecosystem, which will have to
move.  I don't know how we would know when we should 'recommend' 3
though.

Best,

Matthew