I've been using Python 3 for all new projects for over a year. It was painful in the beginning, but my recent experience has been very rewarding. The few libraries that I use that have not been ported have, in almost all circumstances, been replaced by better libraries—I presume that this explains the lack of motivation to port the old ones.<p>That said, there are respected programmers who have good criticisms of Python 3[1] that are more level-headed than this sensationalized article; however, that has not stopped the community at large from moving to Python 3 where possible.<p>Also, as myself and others continue picking up LXC technology (Docker) the issue of host/ops dependencies interfering with project dependencies will gradually vanish—which is the only legitimate point made by the posted article. The title should have been: "My first day with Python 3"<p>[1]: <a href="http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/" rel="nofollow">http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/</a>
A few months ago I attended PyCon SG (Singapore). At some point one of the presenters[1] asked for a show of hands how many people were using Python 2, and how many Python 3. The ratio was about 10 to 1 in favor of Python 2, with hundreds of respondents.<p>Python 3 just doesn't have traction, and it may never get there. It's sort of a shame how Python 2 is now in maintenance-only mode, but on the other hand it's great for professionals: we don't need to worry about the language or the reference implementation changing ever again.<p>[1] Kenneth Reitz, as part of his excellent talk "Python 2.7 & Python 3: A Sacred Love Story."
You could solve that problem by not using Ubuntu: SmartOS, Debian, and OS X all have perfectly functional Python 3 packages. (as I'm sure many distributions and operating systems do)<p>This has very little to do with Python 3.
To summarize the article:<p>Author stumbles upon problems with ubuntu and some other third-party software => concludes that Python 3 is not being used anymore.<p>Well done, sir.
Python strikes me (as a Perl, Haskell developer) as the boring scripting language, which I consider to be a feature. Golang, not Python 3 is the obvious successor for people who want One Way To Do Everything.<p>Ruby was the obvious successor to Perl, rather than Perl 6, but I wonder if Rust ends up being Perl's natural successor. It's fast, there are awesome functional features, and Perl developers tend to be pretty comfortable with the general concept of references... Not going to appeal to the "hack it to get it done quickly" crowd, but as a replacement for bigger Perl 5 projects...
I don't understand how a single anecdote about a packaging issue on a single distro is being used to draw the conclusion that "Python 3 Isn't Being Used More".
Yeah, I had these problems too. I had a problem where I was following the instructions for some Django tutorial and by accident I was always invoking the python 2 interpreter when I should have been running the python 3 interpreter. Death by a thousand cuts.
Hey James,<p>Good to see your post on the front page, and it was a nice writeup. Personally for me the issue with Python 3 has been the lack of support by many good 3rd party Django apps. Until that happens I can't see myself moving anytime soon.
Note: edited, other people made the other points I made<p>Digressive: "Always wanting to be cutting-edge, I decided I would would start with ubuntu 14.04", shouldn't that be 15.04 then? (latest I could see in the mirrors at least)