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Comment by deckiedan | Hacker News Reader

On most OSes, open a terminal and type 'python', and you get a python2 REPL. That's reason enough to write a lot of scripty admin / automation stuff in python2. And then if you need to extend that, it's easy to just continue on in python2. It's there, it works, it's stable, you don't have to maintain versions in case of security issues, the OS package does it for you.

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You can also open a terminal and type 'python3', and get a Python 3 REPL.

I only learned recently that it's a compatibility decision that means that plain 'python' will always be Python 2. However, you're starting to see Python 3 distributed right alongside it in most recent distros.

It's high time to change that default. I'm glad django will not support Python2 after 2020, making clear it's legacy.

Oh absolutely. There's a few linux distros starting to ship python3 by default, which is great. It's happening far too slowly.

Speaking of speed, I hear 3.7 should finally be able to beat 2.7 for most benchmarks, which is pretty sweet.

To give another example, Ubuntu is moving towards Python 3 by default, the plan is to have it as the only pre-installed Python version by 18.04 LTS, which is only a year away.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python

There's a reason the python command points to Python 2: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/#id16 It is anticipated that there will eventually come a time where the third party ecosystem surrounding Python 3 is sufficiently mature for this recommendation to be updated to suggest that the python symlink refer to python3 rather than python2 .

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