[berberous]

I chose to learn Ruby in part because of the confusing Python 2/3 issue. I recognize that this is a largely stupid reason to choose a language, but when lots of people suggest that either language is great to pick-up, well, it was another easy reason to lean Ruby over Python.

[eropple]

I don't agree at all that it's stupid (and I'm someone who'd generally pick Python over Ruby). Fragmentation sucks. Really bad fragmentation sucks more. Python's fragmentation is pretty bad.

[diminish]

It's funny reading this from the Zen of Python "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." [1] while seeing that there are nearly two independent language/ecosystems with the name Python (namely version 2/3).

[1] http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

[pornel]

Having a split like that in a language is terrible. You find libraries that work with not-your-version and you envy features that would make your code cleaner/faster/better, but you can't use them.

- "Ugh, that thing is lacking/stupid/messy."

- "Oh, no problem, that wart has been fixed in Python 3"

- "Can we use it?"

- "No."

[meowface]

As a Python developer, usually this isn't a major problem for me when going out and finding libraries. Almost every library you find will support 2.7, so I pretty much stick to 2.7 when using or writing any code. I miss some of Python 3's good features but the library ecosystem is more important to me.

It's a real pain in the ass when I try to publish my own, though. The generally accepted rule is that all libraries must support 2.6 through 3.4, and this can be a major hassle.

[pekk]

But you can use Python 3, it is your business if you decide you don't want to.

[zgoat]

Not stupid at all. The same concerns and some bad experiences with 2/3 conflicts and deployment issues drove me to Go after investing quite a bit of time with Python, and I've not regretted it yet.

I'm not sure if it was something I did but I also occasionally found that when pip'ing Python 3 libraries with a lot of dependencies, occasionally some of them would actually be Python 2 libraries and things would break.

[endemic]

Hear, hear.