Current Status of Python

Python is amazing.

For a very long time, one of the most important virtues of Python was interoperability. No matter what operating system you or your customers were using, if a Python interpreter was available for that system, your software that was written in Python would work there. And, most importantly, your software would work the same way. However, that's not uncommon anymore. Modern languages such as Ruby and Java provide similar interoperability capabilities. But, interoperability isn't the most important quality of programming language nowadays. With the advent of cloud computing, web-based applications, and reliable virtualization software, it isn't that important to have a programming language that works the same no matter the operating system. What is still important is the tools that allow programmers to efficiently write reliable and maintainable software. Fortunately, Python is still one of the languages that allows programmers the most efficiency, and is definitely a smart choice for a company's primary development language.

Python stays relevant for so long because it is constantly evolving. This book is focused on the latest Python 3.7 version, and all code examples are written in this version of the language unless another version is explicitly mentioned. Because Python has a very long history, and there are still programmers using Python 2 on a daily basis, this book starts with a chapter that describes the current status quo of Python 3. In this chapter, you'll find how and why Python changes, and will learn how to write software that is compatible with both the historic and latest versions of Python.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Where are we now and where we are going to?
• Why and how Python changes
• Being up-to-date with changes to PEP documentation
• Python 3 adoption at the time of writing this book
• The main difference between Python 3 and Python 2
• Not only CPython
• Useful resources