Nobody is switching to Python 3. If you go first you get all of the pain and no advantages (plus switching later isn't very hard anwyay). I would import unicode_literals, division, and the print() function from __future__ and stick with 2.6.
We in python-dev land have been working on discussing various help documents and things associated with the website. For now, if you have lots of 2.x dependencies - use 2.x - it's stable and well supported by the community.<p>If you're doing greenfield development, and don't plan on lots of external dependencies, use 3. Personally, if I didn't have dependencies on a few "really big" external libraries, I <i>would</i> be running 3 in production.<p>This wiki page - a work in progress - should help you if you're thinking about switching.<p><a href="http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3</a>
We are running a web service (just the API no front end) written in Python 3 for a tiny bit less than one year.<p>Even under considerable load, the traditional Apache/mod_wsgi combination never failed (though we had some encoding issues during development).<p>The reason to go p3 was for one the new string handling, which I personally find absolutely beautiful and the idea of future proofing the application. We are a small shop and certainly don't have the resources to rewrite the thing in 3 years when all the cool stuff is happening in python 3 land.<p>This was also the reason to start development of another application in PHP5 just when 5.0.0 came out. There it paid off, though with p3 I'm not quite sure. It looks as if we are stuck with 2.x maybe forever.
We are not switching anytime soon. I have not looked at what they did to the syntax (hopefully nothing). There is really no advantage for us and most likely it will break things.<p>If are starting from scratch it might be OK. I guess it depends on your needs for library support.<p>IMO it was a bad idea to split development like they did. But I am just a user and not in charge. :)<p>If it was me I would pick 2.6
We aren't running Python 3 yet -- we are using Python 2.6.<p>The most impressive things that might push us to upgrade are the new VMs like unladen swallow or PyPy, assuming they don't get backported support for 2.7ish style python.<p>But right now, most libraries are made for 2.x only, and there isn't yet a large enough performance or memory use gap to force us to take the porting hit.
There's no great benefit for the pain. The really cool work in the language - new GIL-removal work, PyPy, pip and virtualenv, etc aren't yet included in Python 3.<p>When I make the jump, it will probably be to the inevitable 3.5 or 4.0 that includes all the juicy stuff.