Python 3.X or Python 2.X [closed]

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What's the ideal Python version for a beginner to start learning Python? I need to recommend some newbies a programming language to learn and I chose Python. I'm still not sure which version.

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It depends what you're going to do with it.

Unicode handling has vastly improved in Python 3. So if you intend to use this for building web pages or some such, Python 3 might be the obvious choice.

On the other hand, many libraries and frameworks still only support Python 2. For example, the numerical processing library numpy, and the web framework Django both only work on Python 2. So if you intend to use any of those, stick with Python 2.

Either way, the differences aren't huge to begin with. I'd say Python 3 is a little easier to pick up (due to its string handling), but that is a good reason to learn Python 2 first. That way, if you run into a piece of Python 2 code (and you will), you'll know what is going on.

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Adoption of Python3 has been held up by a few critical 3rd party packages. numpy is a good example of a package that has just barely started working on Python3. Quite a few other packages depend on numpy, so they will hopefully be supporting Python3 very shortly too.

Most of the time it's possible to write code that is compatible with 2.6/2.7/3.1 by using __future__ imports. So learning one does not mean you are not learning the other.

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My vote is for 3.1

My reasoning is simple and selfish. The more new python programmers that only use 3.1 there are, the more likely it is that one of them is going to decide that they need some library from 2.6 and port it to 3.1 (learning 2.6 in the process I might add).

After this happens, I can start using 3.1: it looks really cool.

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I would suggest Python 2.6; I know it's old, but it's not only the current standard, and there is way more documentation and libraries available for it.

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I'll throw my experience into the works:

Right now you should be using 2.6. Switch to 2.7 when 2.7.1 comes out. Switch to 3.1/2 when all the libraries you want are fully supported and stable there.