Python 2.x and Python 3.x are two major releases of the python programming language. Python 2 was released in 2000 and now in 2020, it is no longer in development. It was easy to write code in Python 2 as compared to its prior versions.
The developers of the Python programming language notice so many problems in Python 2 so to fix those problems Python 3 was released in 2008. Python 3 was not backward compatible with python 2 which means code written in python 2 cannot be run in Python 3 and vice versa.
The organizations that were using Python 2 start migrating their projects to Python 3 due to its various benefits. Anyone who wants needs to make so many changes to migrate the python 2 code to Python 3. Some features of Python 3 was backported to make this process easier.
The differences between python 2 and python 3
Some of the major differences between python 2 and Python 3 are –
- The syntax of python 3 is comparatively easier than python 2
- The default storing of strings in Python 3 is Unicode whereas to store a string in Unicode you need to use “u” in Python 2
- In Python 3 exception are enclosed using the parenthesis while in Python 2 it was enclosed with notations
- Python 3 offers Range() function to perform iteration whereas in Python 2 iteration was performed using function xrange()
- The rules of the ordering are simplified in Python 3 whereas in python 2 these rules are complex
Which one you should use Python 2 or Python 3
The only reason that why you should use Python 2 is because your organization is using a larger codebase that was written in Python 2. And migrating the whole application to Python 3 is a big and time-consuming task. Another thing is Python 2 will no longer be maintained by developers after 2020.
Python 2 is legacy while Python 3 is the future so if you start learning python programming learn it with Python 3. Python 3 not only increases the features of python 2 in Python 3 but the overall performance of the language is also drastically improved.
How to install Python 3 on my system?
You can download and install the latest version of Python 3 from its official site i.e. python.org. On this site option to download is given for different platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
Additionally, you can follow how to install python3 on Linux, if you are using a Linux system.
Next, We will see how to set up the python development environment using VSCode in Linux or Windows.