Choosing between Python 2 and 3

The story of Python 2 and Python 3 is long and full of fairly passionate debate. When Python 3 was released, the intention was to have all of the libraries that make Python 2 good enough to be upgraded to work with version 3. It turned out that many of the differences in the coding standards between the versions made the library upgrades too much work, and in other cases, the authors of these libraries refused to upgrade to Python 3 because they disagreed with the changes that came with the new major version.

If you use Python a lot, you'll probably end up using both, which makes for the least ideal scenario--some libraries are only available with one version or the other, and so you may end up being forced to use both to complete your solutions. We'll explore the pros and cons to each in the next recipe.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will want to use the GUI, so log on to your Pi over a VNC connection, or if you have it attached to a monitor,...