Write Pythonic Code Like a Seasoned Developer Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Python 3 or Python 2?
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0:01
Before we get to the actual code examples, let's really quickly talk about setup, tools, versions, that sort of thing.
0:07
So, this course is built with Python 3 in mind. If you don't have Python 3 installed, you can get it for your operating system at Python.org/downloads,
0:16
or you can "Homebrew" or "apt get install" it. That said, most of the topics will actually be quite similar between Python 2 and Python 3,
0:24
so we'll talk about Python 2 whenever there are significant differences. You may be wondering why are we talking about Python 3,
0:30
when Python 2 is more widely used today in commercial applications. Let's look at Python over time and I think you'll see why I made this decision;
0:39
if we start at the beginning, back in 1989, Guido started work on Python. 1991, Python 1 came out, 2000 Python 2, and then, in 2008 Python 3 came out,
0:51
and this was the first major breaking change to try to improve and clean up the language from all the years that had preceded it.
0:58
Well, there was limited adoption because people already had large working code basis, a lot of the PyPi packages were not updated and so on,
1:06
now if we look at today Python 3 has default as much more common than it has been but more importantly,
1:12
if you look just four years into the future, not far at all, you will see that Python 2 is "end of life",
1:18
there will be no more support for Python 2 in less than four years. And that means, whoever has projects, written in Python 2
1:24
have to not just start upgrading them, but complete the upgrades by then. So I expect there to be quite a pick up for Python 3
1:32
and I think focusing on Python 3 is very important going forward. Guido Van Rossum and the core developers feel this way as well,
1:40
if you look at the last three keynotes, there has been something like this where Guido has gotten up at PyCon and said,
1:47
"There is not going to be another version of Python 2, going forward it's all about Python 3." So, that's why this course itself is based on Python 3,
1:55
even though like I said, differences are quite minor for the topics we are covering.