I have been very down on Python 3 in the past. I remain sort of down on it, especially in the face of substantial non-current versions on the platforms I use and want to use, but there's another side of this that I should admit to: I kind of want to be using Python 3.

What this comes down to at its heart is that for all the nasty things I say about it, Python 3 is where the new and cool stuff is happening in Python. Python 3 is where all of the action is and I like that in general. Python 2 is dead, even if it's going to linger on for a good long while, and I can see the writing on the wall here.

(One part of that death is that increasingly, interesting new modules are only going to be Python 3 or are going to be Python 3 first and only Python 2 later and half-heartedly.)

And Python 3 is genuinely interesting. It has a bunch of new idioms to get used to, various challenges to overcome, all sorts of things to learn, and so on. All of these are things that generally excite me as a programmer and make it interesting to code stuff (learning is fun, provided I have a motivation).

Life would be a lot easier if I didn't feel this way. If I felt that Python 3 had totally failed as a language iteration, if I thought it had taken a terrible wrong turn that made it a bad idea, it would be easy to walk away from it entirely and ignore it. But it hasn't. While I dislike some of its choices and some of them are going to cause me pain, I do expect that the Python 3 changes are generally good ones (and so I want to explore them). Instead, I sort of yearn to program in Python 3.

So why haven't I? Certainly one reason is that I just haven't been writing new Python code lately (and beyond that I have real concerns about subjecting my co-workers to Python 3 for production code). But there's a multi-faceted reason beyond that, one that's going to take another entry to own up to.

(One aspect of the no new code issue is that another language has been competing for my affections and doing pretty well so far. That too is a complex issue.)