* Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> [2015-06-01 00:15:01 +1000]: > On 31 May 2015 at 19:07, Ludovic Gasc <gml...@gmail.com> wrote: > > About Python 3 migration, I think that one of our best control stick is > > newcomers, and by extension, Python trainers/teachers. > > If newcomers learn first Python 3, when they will start to work > > professionally, they should help to rationalize the Python 3 migration > > inside existing dev teams, especially because they don't have an interest > > conflict based on the fact that they haven't written plenty of code with > > Python 2. > > 2020 is around the corner, 5 years shouldn't be enough to change the > > community mind, I don't know. > > The education community started switching a while back - if you watch > Carrie-Anne Philbin's PyCon UK 2014 keynote, one of her requests for > the broader Python community was for everyone else to just catch up > already in order to reduce student's confusion (she phrased it more > politely than that, though). Educators need to tweak examples and > exercises to account for a version switch, but that's substantially > easier than migrating hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines > of production code. > > And yes, if you learn Python 3 first, subsequently encountering Python > 2's quirks and cruft is likely to encourage folks that know both > versions of the language to start advocating for a version upgrade :)
I think a big issue here is the lack of good newcomer tutorials for Python 3. In the #python IRC channel, "learn Python the hard way"[1] is often recommended, and the common consensus seems to be that all other tutorials (other than the official one[2] which is clearly not aimed at newcomers to programming) seem to lack in some way. LPTHW is Python 2 only, so at least from what I see in #python, many newcomers are recommended to learn Python 2 rather than 3 because of that. I agree migrating large existing codebases (and developers) from 2 to 3 can be quite an issue, and a lot of energy went into making this easier (which is good!). But I also think nobody fresh to Python should start learning Python 2 now, except when there's a compelling reason (such as unported libraries without alternatives). Florian [1] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ [2] https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html -- http://www.the-compiler.org | m...@the-compiler.org (Mail/XMPP) GPG: 916E B0C8 FD55 A072 | http://the-compiler.org/pubkey.asc I love long mails! | http://email.is-not-s.ms/
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