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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, it is difficult for me to move to Python 3 (and I want to). I'm working on a Django project and relying heavily on various Django plugins. There are a whole lot of plugins that are only supported for Python 2. Without much knowledge of Django landscape, I anticipated this and went with Python 2.7. Turned out to be a prudent decision that saved me tons of time.

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Interestingly, Django is one of the big projects that has already announced they're dropping Python 2 support before 2020. Django 1.11, to be released in April 2017, is scheduled to be the last version to support Python 2. [1]

They've prudently made their last Py2 release a long-term support release, but if you want new Django features after December 2017, you're going to be using Python 3.

Django works great on Python 3, BTW, and if you've got plugins that haven't updated, I would recommend being a bit suspicious of their code quality.

[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/jun/25/roadmap/

If it helps anyone, 1.8 works with 2.7 and was an LTS release, which is supported until April 2018. You don't get the cool new features like Channels out of the box, but they're available via third parties.

I started a new project in Django recently and Python3 was obviously the choice. The nice thing is that if a library doesn't support Python3 then it's a good smell that it's bloated (or 'mature') and worth finding a replacement for. Sadly, many legacy Django packages are basically losing steam and shouldn't be used.

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