The general advice I give is: "Python 3 if you can, Python 2 if you must." That is, if you can use Python 3, you should: it's the future of the language, and i

The general advice I give is: "Python 3 if you can, Python 2 if you must." That is, if you can use Python 3, you should: it's the future of the language, and it feels it. I find Python 3 significantly more pleasant than Python 2; nearly all the bits that annoy me about Python are fixed in 3. Python 3 is cleaner, the standard library is de-crufted and easier to navigate, and (most important to me) handling unicode doesn't suck. However, as others in this thread note, significant parts of the Python ecosystem haven't finished porting yet (Django, Twisted, yada yada yada). If you rely on one of those things, then stick with Python 2. If that code lives fo a long time you will have to face a porting effort later on, but that's improving somewhat as the community discovers new techniques and creates new tools.