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Comment by Stubb | Hacker News Reader

Amazing that Python 2 vs. Python 3 has still not yet been sorted out. I dipped my toe into Python a couple years ago when looking for a general-purpose scripting language and quickly gave up in frustration—Python 3 was by far the preferable flavor, but many libraries simply didn't work. I picked up Ruby and haven't looked back.

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Likewise...and when I have to work in Python it's a frustrating pain because the tooling is so much better on the Ruby side.

Heck, the tooling is better on the PHP side even...

A lot has improved since a couple years ago. A majority of major libraries have both Python 2 and 3 support these days. I've since started all new projects in Python 3.

i started with python when 3 dropped in ~2008.917

ignorant of any prior ecosystem i just thought i was getting into the most current

i came for the prebaked arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic and now i use it for prototyping all of my projects, and all the other stuff that i would call general scripting

this 2to3 complaint made sense to me from an employed standpoint:i work as X and use 2.7's Y library; but you said general scripting

i wonder what libraries were you hoping to use but were unable, and for what general scripting purpose?

This was back in late 2013. My general scripting had to do with automating wireless network simulations to explore parameter spaces and slicing & dicing results stored in MySQL or SQLite databases.

I recall several showstoppers in Python v3 including integration into Emacs, accessing a MySQL database, and basic visualization. The library system was also a mess. It didn't seem possible to develop on v3 and expect that the libraries you needed would be available. Or that anyone else would care since they were all using v2.7.

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