<story><title>Python 2.7.7 released</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-June/134694.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>niuzeta</author><text>huh, as a developer &lt;i&gt;thinking of starting Python&lt;/i&gt;, is python 2.X still worthwhile to start with? The python.org even has a subsection for &amp;#x27;starting with 2 or 3&amp;#x27;, and of course they promote 3, but recent posts have made me think twice about starting with the newest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acdha</author><text>Python 3 is increasingly the better choice. The major exception is if you need a library which hasn&amp;#x27;t been ported yet but that list continues to shrink:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://python3wos.appspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;python3wos.appspot.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The good news is that it&amp;#x27;s increasingly easy to write programs which run on both using newer idioms via __future__ backports, which is often both future proof and a way to write better code using newer language features which many people miss out on due to habit and old tutorials.&lt;p&gt;Lennart Regebro has a wonderful guide covering the changes and how to deal with them as painlessly as possible:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://python3porting.com/differences.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;python3porting.com&amp;#x2F;differences.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Python 2.7.7 released</title><url>https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2014-June/134694.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>niuzeta</author><text>huh, as a developer &lt;i&gt;thinking of starting Python&lt;/i&gt;, is python 2.X still worthwhile to start with? The python.org even has a subsection for &amp;#x27;starting with 2 or 3&amp;#x27;, and of course they promote 3, but recent posts have made me think twice about starting with the newest.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>Start with 3.  Most of the complaints you see on Hacker News are from people who have a large existing codebase in 2.x that they&amp;#x27;d need to migrate over, or who need to use an esoteric library that hasn&amp;#x27;t been ported over.  It will probably never make sense for these people to migrate; they have a large fixed cost to update their software, and the benefits won&amp;#x27;t outweigh them for a long time.  You don&amp;#x27;t have that cost, so you might as well enjoy the benefits.</text></comment>