I may have agreed with this a year or two ago. Not now though. The situation is way better than it used to be, and only improving.
Developing a new module to run on both Python 2 and Python 3 is also much less of a pain than it used to be. Particularly if you follow the advice on (http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/). It does make your code less beautiful than a pure Python 3 code base, but that is the price you pay for compatibility.
My biggest porting headache was adding Python 3 support to PyFilesystem. It was tricky because this library is an abstraction layer for files, which work quite differently in Python 3, and we didn't want to have to write everything from scratch. I have ported another, much larger project, in a day. It was tedious work, but no major issues.
But these problems only effect library developers. If you're building an application, just use Python 3. Most libraries have Python 3 support, and most of the ones that don't are probably not actively maintained any more.
I agree: we use Python3 for new applications all the time. We never have any complaints and everyone is happy with the features of Python3.
The tone of this article is histrionic enough to be dismissed, not to mention that examples are missing for claims such as the following: "A lot of libraries have been ported, but ten times as many have not, and are not trivial to port."
Here is a comment I made 2 months ago when I did an analysis of the top 200 Python libraries according to the Python 3 Wall of Superpowers. In this analysis I show that support for Python 3 drops off rather quickly as you move down the list.
Note: I don't fully trust the data on Python 3 WOS but since supporters of Python 3 love to point to it, the analysis in the linked comment was made against it. The reason why I'm skeptical of that web site is that it always says it has recently been updated but yet I'm aware of quite a few projects that should be on that list which is missing. For instance the cffi module which is very popular and has be downloaded nearly 2 million times is not on the list.
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u/willm May 26 '14
I may have agreed with this a year or two ago. Not now though. The situation is way better than it used to be, and only improving.
Developing a new module to run on both Python 2 and Python 3 is also much less of a pain than it used to be. Particularly if you follow the advice on (http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to-python-3-redux/). It does make your code less beautiful than a pure Python 3 code base, but that is the price you pay for compatibility.
My biggest porting headache was adding Python 3 support to PyFilesystem. It was tricky because this library is an abstraction layer for files, which work quite differently in Python 3, and we didn't want to have to write everything from scratch. I have ported another, much larger project, in a day. It was tedious work, but no major issues.
But these problems only effect library developers. If you're building an application, just use Python 3. Most libraries have Python 3 support, and most of the ones that don't are probably not actively maintained any more.