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I find these responses promising. I see some negativity here that after 5 years, over half of the devs are still on Python 2. But reading some of the threads

by jcater 13y ago

I find these responses promising. I see some negativity here that after 5 years, over half of the devs are still on Python 2. But reading some of the threads in the last few weeks, you would assume that fewer than 5% of all people attempting Python 3 stuck with it. And this survey, if it is representative of the community at large, obviously doesn't show that. Sure, more people use Python 2 than 3, but is that really surprising with the legacy code out there? The point is that Python 3 is also being used quite a bit.

shadowmint 13y ago
Fewer than ~22% are sticking with python 3. Admittedly that's more than 5%, but I'd hardly call it a blazing success story, when 60% of people have tried it. So, 22% of 60% of people all up are sticking with python 3. 13%. Woo...
- jcater 13y ago
  Where do you come up with 22% of 60% as sticking with it? The 22% I assume came from the question of which do you program in most. I program in Python 2 most currently too because of legacy projects. But I also do a lot in Python 3 as well, just not "most".
- drdeadringer 13y ago
  Python 3 meets my needs just fine. However, I do tend to live in the future.
- the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
  Less than 4% of pypi download stats are Python 3, so i doubt the results of this survey are representative.
  - janzer 13y ago
    I'm wondering where that number comes from? I've seen this stat a few times recently but don't know where it came from. Just doing a quick perusal of the top 5 projects listed at http://pypi-ranking.info/alltime http://pypi-ranking.info/alltime 1 (boto) does not support 3.x 3 (distribute, zc.buildout and pip) only distribute non-version dependent files leaving just 1 (lxml) with version dependent installers listed at all and it is only for the windows installers. Drilling down into lxml, roughly 95% of its downloads are the version agnostic .tar.gz file. Also the version dependent installers do not include a 3.3 version but only 3.2 for python3. But even with only an installer for a old version of python3 available it still is >8% of version dependent downloads.
    - shadowmint 13y ago
      I suppose it was derived somehow from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypstats https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypstats As a number of people have pointed out though, there's no new data since May 2013, no idea why (https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/33/package-stats-no-longer-updated https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/33/package-stats-no-lo...), so the the '4%' number is probably out of date anyway.
- cjo 13y ago
  > Do you have dependencies keeping you on 2.x? > Yes: 61.46% > No: 38.54% I know that's why I returned to 2 after trying 3. For example BeautifulSoup (HTML parsing/scraping) has only supported Python 3 since October '13. There was nothing wrong with 3, it was just dependency issues. Plus, when 2.7 was released it was done with a promise of ~6 years of support[0] to aid in the transition to 3.x. I think the definition of success here needs to take that into account. [0] - https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-May/099971.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-May/099971...
mlangdon 13y ago
Don't you think there's the tiniest chance that 3.X users will over-represent themselves in a nonrandom survey just as they do amongst the developers? This is laughable: "we asked people with a vested interest in seeming more numerous than they are to take our survey. And they did. Reassuring!"
- toyg 13y ago
  I don't think py3 devs "over-represent" themselves at all. If anything, it's very fashionable to proudly announce that py3 is a waste of time and you're never going to use it.
  - saurik 13y ago
    The problem is more that this is a biased representation: if people on the Python development mailing list (which I can't imagine spends much time talking about Python 2 ;P), people who care enough about Python to still be on Usenet using comp.lang.python (although they seem to actually mean the official Python user mailing list, given the hyperlink...), and the programming hipster crowd from Hacker News (which is one of the few communities I am a part of that seems to remotely like Python 3) are at this low of a representation, the average developer base is going to be much lower ;P. Given this prior expected distribution, these results are thereby quite damning evidence against Python 3... (which matches the less intrinsically flawed, although still problematic in the other direction, data from a few days ago that less than 2% of downloads from the Python Package Index are from Python 3 (this is problematic as this is likely biased somewhat by production websites that are spawned and download packages over and over and over again; that said, that expectation itself is demonstration of the relative strength of Python 2, and could even be considered an ignorable bias if the question is not to measure users but instead to measure importance).
- takluyver 13y ago
  We ran a user survey for IPython, where there's little reason to expect a bias towards Python 3 users. 22% said they use IPython with Python 3.3 (they could select more than one answer). I guess early adopters may be more likely to answer surveys, but from this and bug reports, it does feel like there's a growing minority using Python 3.

by jcater 13y ago

shadowmint 13y ago

Fewer than ~22% are sticking with python 3. Admittedly that's more than 5%, but I'd hardly call it a blazing success story, when 60% of people have tried it. So, 22% of 60% of people all up are sticking with python 3. 13%. Woo...

jcater 13y ago
Where do you come up with 22% of 60% as sticking with it? The 22% I assume came from the question of which do you program in most. I program in Python 2 most currently too because of legacy projects. But I also do a lot in Python 3 as well, just not "most".
drdeadringer 13y ago
Python 3 meets my needs just fine. However, I do tend to live in the future.
the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
Less than 4% of pypi download stats are Python 3, so i doubt the results of this survey are representative.
- janzer 13y ago
  I'm wondering where that number comes from? I've seen this stat a few times recently but don't know where it came from. Just doing a quick perusal of the top 5 projects listed at http://pypi-ranking.info/alltime http://pypi-ranking.info/alltime 1 (boto) does not support 3.x 3 (distribute, zc.buildout and pip) only distribute non-version dependent files leaving just 1 (lxml) with version dependent installers listed at all and it is only for the windows installers. Drilling down into lxml, roughly 95% of its downloads are the version agnostic .tar.gz file. Also the version dependent installers do not include a 3.3 version but only 3.2 for python3. But even with only an installer for a old version of python3 available it still is >8% of version dependent downloads.
  - shadowmint 13y ago
    I suppose it was derived somehow from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypstats https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pypstats As a number of people have pointed out though, there's no new data since May 2013, no idea why (https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/33/package-stats-no-longer-updated https://bitbucket.org/pypa/pypi/issue/33/package-stats-no-lo...), so the the '4%' number is probably out of date anyway.
cjo 13y ago
> Do you have dependencies keeping you on 2.x? > Yes: 61.46% > No: 38.54% I know that's why I returned to 2 after trying 3. For example BeautifulSoup (HTML parsing/scraping) has only supported Python 3 since October '13. There was nothing wrong with 3, it was just dependency issues. Plus, when 2.7 was released it was done with a promise of ~6 years of support[0] to aid in the transition to 3.x. I think the definition of success here needs to take that into account. [0] - https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-May/099971.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2010-May/099971...

mlangdon 13y ago

Don't you think there's the tiniest chance that 3.X users will over-represent themselves in a nonrandom survey just as they do amongst the developers? This is laughable: "we asked people with a vested interest in seeming more numerous than they are to take our survey. And they did. Reassuring!"

toyg 13y ago
I don't think py3 devs "over-represent" themselves at all. If anything, it's very fashionable to proudly announce that py3 is a waste of time and you're never going to use it.
- saurik 13y ago
  The problem is more that this is a biased representation: if people on the Python development mailing list (which I can't imagine spends much time talking about Python 2 ;P), people who care enough about Python to still be on Usenet using comp.lang.python (although they seem to actually mean the official Python user mailing list, given the hyperlink...), and the programming hipster crowd from Hacker News (which is one of the few communities I am a part of that seems to remotely like Python 3) are at this low of a representation, the average developer base is going to be much lower ;P. Given this prior expected distribution, these results are thereby quite damning evidence against Python 3... (which matches the less intrinsically flawed, although still problematic in the other direction, data from a few days ago that less than 2% of downloads from the Python Package Index are from Python 3 (this is problematic as this is likely biased somewhat by production websites that are spawned and download packages over and over and over again; that said, that expectation itself is demonstration of the relative strength of Python 2, and could even be considered an ignorable bias if the question is not to measure users but instead to measure importance).
takluyver 13y ago
We ran a user survey for IPython, where there's little reason to expect a bias towards Python 3 users. 22% said they use IPython with Python 3.3 (they could select more than one answer). I guess early adopters may be more likely to answer surveys, but from this and bug reports, it does feel like there's a growing minority using Python 3.