Welcome back.
Whenever you start to learn Python, it's unavoidable that you'll encounter this topic of Python two
versus Python three.
So what is this all about?
And it's a very important topic.
Now, first of all, Python is created by a human right.
As a matter of fact, it was created by this person right here.
His name is Guido.
Now, a programming language is always evolving.
It's not like somebody creates a programming language.
It's perfect.
And that's it.
No, all programming languages are constantly being updated.
Just like on your phone, you constantly get software updates.
Well, a programming language is constantly evolving to make it better and better because nobody gets
it right the first time.
And by the way, this is a great video that I'm going to link to.
You can check it out in the resources.
Now, Python was created in 1991 by this gentleman, and it was actually created with the name from
Monty Python, which was a British comedy group.
But like I said before, the language is always evolving.
And in 2008, Guido decided that, well, Python version two, which has been used for a very long time,
had some things that he and the community wanted to change.
So in 2008, they decided to create Python three, a new version of the language.
Here was the tricky part.
You see, when you update software, let's say on your phone or even on your laptop, you expect things
to keep working, right?
Updates are usually good.
They're improvements.
But some of the features that Python two had they didn't like or they wanted to change completely.
So Python three introduced to what we call breaking changes.
That is, if you update it to Python three, remember the Python interpreter, the C Python translator
that we've been talking about?
Well, as soon as you updated that your Python two code wasn't really going to work.
It's like updating your phone and then all of a sudden, all your apps stop working.
That doesn't sound very good, does it?
That's pretty much what happened in 2008.
Most companies that wrote their code in Python version two just kept Python version two because, well,
for them to upgrade meant that they had to go through their code line by line and make some changes.
Now, these changes weren't that significant.
For example, I'll link to some resources, but don't worry, these are topics that we're going to cover
throughout the course.
But different things wouldn't work.
For example, the print function, which we've learned about in Python two, it didn't have the brackets.
It looked like this.
And Python three.
Used the brackets, so all the code that had print like this would break.
Now, the differences themselves aren't that big.
I mean, you can read through them and we'll talk about this in the course, but overall, you can learn
them in a day.
That's why when we learn Python, most of the time we're learning Python three.
But you can use the same knowledge with the older version of Python.
Now you may see some Python version two code out there for companies that haven't upgraded, but it's
now what we call legacy.
That is, come 2020, it's going to stop receiving security updates.
So the community, Python community as a whole is saying, hey, everybody start using Python three
because we're going to stop maintaining Python two.
So we're going to learn the most up to date version three in this course.
But we're also going to touch on some older topics that Python two covers just in case you encounter
them when you work for a company that perhaps still supports legacy code.
But as I mentioned, the whole community as a whole is moving towards Python three.
This website, for example, shows you how many big packages, popular Python packages, which we'll
talk about support Python three.
In our case, there's only four popular packages that don't support Python three.
So what I'm saying is Python three is the way to go.
It's the way of the future.
That's what we're going to learn in the course.
But I want you to be aware of the historical context and one thing to be careful of when in this course
you're searching for answers.
Or maybe I have some exercises that require you to Google things.
For example, if we go to the Python documentation, which is the reference of how well what the programming
language does, you'll see that.
You can choose the versions here and you always want to go with the latest, but you might find some
answers online that still use Python version two.
So you want to make sure that when you're searching for answers that you don't encounter any legacy
code.
Like I said, 95% of the time it's mostly the same.
But you usually want to keep current with the language.
It has the most community support, most up to date, most secure language.
So just a quick note about Python three versus Python two.
When you hear the word Python, people are generally just talking about both Python three and Python
two.
And if you remember in our ripple, when we created our first program, you see that you're using Python
version 3.6.
This is the default standard version that ripple comes with.
So right away we know that we're using Python three.
Awesome.
It's up to date.
It's new.
The whole community is behind it.
Well, most of the community is behind it, so we're all good to go.
I'll see you in the next video.
Bye bye.