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Moving to Python 3

A week ago the support period for the last version of Python 2 was extended by 5 years (from 2015 to 2020) and this event just ignited once again the discussion about the fragmentation in the python ecosystem. Some have the opinion that version 2 should have a 2.8 release while others keep saying that the future is python 3 and this event will delay even more the adoption of the new version.

The truth is, version 3 already has almost 5 and half years (released in December 2008) and it seem it didn’t have yet conquered enough number of users to dethrone the old version. While the first iterations of the new major version met many critics (3.0 until 3.2),  the last 2 releases seems to have conquered very good reviews and after many years the majority of the most important libraries and modules seems to have support for python 3 (can be checked here ).

This way and after some thought, i decided that it is time (maybe a little late) to change my default development version for new projects to python3, since it really is the future of this programming language and it is time to move on. There will be exceptions of course, like old projects that need to be maintained,  new ones where the requirements do not allow the new version or where the needed packages do not yet support python 3.

So lets check what this “new” version has to offer.

By Gonçalo Valério

Software developer and owner of this blog. More in the "about" page.