Which Python should I use?

Answer 1

2.X still offers a far wider variety of third-party libraries / frameworks, instructional websites and books, and experts to help you out -- I expect this will continue for a few years until 3.X gradually overtakes it. Right now, therefore, I would still recommend 2.X despite 3.x's even-greater "clean-ness" and simplicity (because some cruft which 2.x has to keen around for backwards compatibility was finally wiped out in 3.x). Very few new features of 3.x are not backported in 2.x, by the way -- e..g, if you want print to be a function, like in 3.x, in your 2.6 or 2.7 module, just put, at the start of the module, the statement

from __future__ import print_function

"Importing from the future" is a typical Python way to make new features available when explicitly requested, without breaking backwards compatibility.

Answer 2

2.x

Quite some modules have not yet been ported to python 3 and you will find much more books, online resources for learning python 2.x

You also can't rely on python 3 being preinstalled, while for most linux distributions you can rely on some version of python 2 being available. The only one I know of that already has python 3 packages is the latest Fedora 13. If that matters to you depends on your needs.

Answer 3

I'd say it depends where you are going to run the code. If you have complete control over the environment, use 3.x. If your environment is controlled externally (cheap webhosting for example) then you will probably need to use 2.x. The only other reason to stick with 2.x is if a critical library you can't live without hasn't been ported to 3.x yet. Don't saddle new code with 2.x-isms if you can avoid it.

Answer 4

If you are just learning Python (and you don't have a specific project you need to complete), I'd suggest that you start with the newest version (3.x). Even if you start with 2.x, though, the basics will be the same, so you will be able to learn any differences in 3.x very quickly.

Answer 5

See also this related (though not identical) thread on Python 3.0.

While I think the case for 3.x is more compelling than it was a year ago, it still doesn't have the breadth of third-party library coverage of 2.x. I would suggest developing for 2.6 and making use of the migration utilities when the time finally comes (e.g. some dependency is forcing you) to move to 3.x.

Answer 6

Go with 2.x

I ran into a lot of compatibility issues with libraries and Python 3.x, although I can't recall which ones specifically. The specific issue I was seeing had to do with unicode strings, which I understand is the default in Python 3. The library threw an exception when using unicode strings, and returned an error for normal ASCII strings. This was about 6 months ago, and I'm assuming the support hasn't drastically improved since then.

If you're absolutely sure you won't use any external libraries, 3.x might not bite you. As a compromise, you could use 2.x and try to avoid the changes in 3.x to make it compatible.

Answer 7

You are in luck! Due to a lot of confusion about this people have put together a wiki page in the last few days: Should I use Python 2 or 3?