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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

This is reason enough to upgrade from Python 2.7 if you are still on it. I use this convenience almost daily.

No it isn’t.

One of the issues with Python 3 is that there isn’t really one killer feature, it’s countless little ones. Many believe 3.6 was the first release where they added up to enough of a benefit (though f-strings are a big help for many projects).

Regardless it no longer matters, the Python 2 ecosystem is now rotting as packages drop support. Every week I have to make one or two hot fixes somewhere to forcibly pin to an old version to fix something.

I would definitely mention integer division as a massive change in py3 too. In my field, the @ multiplication operator is also useful.

> I would definitely mention integer division as a massive change in py3 too.

To be fair, you can get that in Python 2 too:

  from __future__ import division

For me, proper handling and distinction of Unicode vs. binary data was a game changer. I don't know if that's related to my first language being non-English, but I remember it being really important to me and a strong reason why I made the switch years ago.

I used to work for a huge SEM business working with keywords in all languages of the world. No-brainer.

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