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[Python-Dev] Python 2.x and 3.x use survey, 2014 edition

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Sat Dec 13 22:24:29 CET 2014 
On Sat, 13 Dec 2014 10:17:59 -0500, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Dec 13, 2014, at 12:29 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
> >For what it’s worth, I almost exclusively write 2/3 compatible code (and
> >that’s with the “easy” subset of 2.6+ and either 3.2+ or 3.3+) and doing so
> >does make the language far less fun for me than when I was writing 2.x only
> >code.
> 
> For myself, the way I'd put it is:
> 
> With the libraries I maintain, I generally write Python 2/3 compatible code,
> targeting Python 2.7 and 3.4, with 2.6, 3.3, and 3.2 support as bonuses,
> although I will not contort too much to support those older versions.  Doing
> so does make the language far less fun for me than when I am writing 3.x only
> code.  All applications I write in pure Python 3, targeting Python 3.4, unless
> my dependencies are not all available in Python 3, or I haven't yet had the
> cycles/resources to port to Python 3.  Writing and maintaining applications in
> Python 2 is far less fun than doing so in Python 3.

I think this is an important distinction.  The considerations are very
different for library maintainers than they are for application
maintainers.  Most of my work is in (customer) applications, and except
for one customer who insists on using an old version of RedHat, I've
been on "latest" python3 for those for quite a while now.  I suspect we
hear less here from people in that situation than would be proportional
to their absolute numbers.

--David
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