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This year I've been spending a lot of time learning Python as I can tell, even being a longtime Rubyist, that Python is the better language for teaching and for general purpose usage...and since Python 3 is already pretty mature, I figured I should just pretend that Python 2 doesn't exist... Well, after a month of studying, using, and teaching the language...all I can say is, the conflict between 2 and 3 definitely lives up to the hype :)...Most of the changes make sense to me, and even as a "do-whatever-you-feel-like-aesthetically" Rubyist, I appreciate what Guido did/attempted to do in the clean-up. But things like lambda...there obviously was no easy answer...I love lambdas, but it's so functionally limited and awkward in Python that I also see Guido's point about just removing it from the language (ultimately, he gave up on that)... But what about the built-in reduce()? Again, it's another function that I instinctively reach for as a Rubyist...and yet it's so awkward in Python that, again, like lambda, maybe it should die? But in this case, Guido halfway-won, and now it's been pushed into the functools package. Mmmkay. And so it is with so many of the 2 to 3 changes at the interface level...as a newbie, it's just mostly amusing since I have no legacy code to port over, but I definitely understand the strife. But the conflict is still hard to avoid as a newbie...many of the most used guides (LPTHW, Codecademy's Python track) are just done in Python 2...LPTHW says right up front to stay the fuck away from 3.x. I don't think Codecademy even bothers to mention what version they're teaching...obviously, beginners don't need to get into the version wars, but as soon as they get past Codecademy and start Googling around, they're going to be in for some surprises. Hell, the act of Googling is itself affected by the version-wars...everytime I google for commands/subsections in the official Python docs, the version 2.x docs are always at top. Sometimes the 3.x docs don't even show up. At least I know that there's a 3.x and how to manually switch to those docs...imagine all the novices who are also Googling for references...it's not hard to think that the cycle of 2.x indoctrination is propped up by the simple fact that 2.x docs/help are always at the top of the Google results. |