For what it's worth, it was intended to be a slow transition (3-5 years) since it's a chicken/egg situation because of backwards compatibility.
The good news is that adoption should pick up very quickly after this fall. Python 3.3 will make it easier to port Python 2 projects and provide more incentives to upgrade. There's also nearly a critical percentage of major packages ported, and Django (which is still on Python 2, and is a deal breaker for many people) will have experimental support for versions up to 3.3.
I expect that by this time next year, the default for most new projects will be Python 3.
Friendly question - What is the reason for the delay, I haven't read much on the reasons why Django doesn't support Python 3 as I have been happy with 2.7 for ages.
To get to Python 3 support, you first have to drop support for Python 2 versions under 2.6, because 2.6 began introducing Python 3 compatibility features that make it possible to run the same code on 2.6/2.7 and on 3.x.
That's basically 90% of the time taken right there, since we had to do it one Python version at a time, giving people warnings that we'd be dropping support for 2.3, then 2.4, etc. so they'd be able to migrate up to a newer Python.
Comments
For what it's worth, it was intended to be a slow transition (3-5 years) since it's a chicken/egg situation because of backwards compatibility.
The good news is that adoption should pick up very quickly after this fall. Python 3.3 will make it easier to port Python 2 projects and provide more incentives to upgrade. There's also nearly a critical percentage of major packages ported, and Django (which is still on Python 2, and is a deal breaker for many people) will have experimental support for versions up to 3.3.
I expect that by this time next year, the default for most new projects will be Python 3.
agreed. Django is a major reason why adoption hasn't been quicker up to now.
Wait till this fall when we release Django 1.5 :)
Friendly question - What is the reason for the delay, I haven't read much on the reasons why Django doesn't support Python 3 as I have been happy with 2.7 for ages.
To get to Python 3 support, you first have to drop support for Python 2 versions under 2.6, because 2.6 began introducing Python 3 compatibility features that make it possible to run the same code on 2.6/2.7 and on 3.x.
That's basically 90% of the time taken right there, since we had to do it one Python version at a time, giving people warnings that we'd be dropping support for 2.3, then 2.4, etc. so they'd be able to migrate up to a newer Python.