Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014)

"I would say there is currently no “right” or “wrong” as long as both Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x support the libraries that you are planning to use." I would like to consider python for my next project, but this is extremely short sighted advice which begs the very real question: why should I consider python at all for a new, multi year project when there is no clear path forward for the language and there hasn't been in a…

"Now, in Python 3, we finally have Unicode (utf-8) strings, and 2 byte classes: byte and bytearrays." No, they are Unicode strings. utf-8 is an encoding, and only comes into play when you want to encode strings into bytes for sending them somewhere, or decode them from bytes when receiving them. The interpreter's internal representation of the string is either UCS-4 or an automatically selected encoding (http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/), but that is an irrelevant implementation detail. Conceptually…

"Now, in Python 3, we finally have Unicode (utf-8) strings" This is not correct. Python strings are either ASCII, UCS-2 or UCS-4 depending on what code points they contain. Python 3 source code is by default UTF-8 and string literals are converted to the internal representation. You have to encode strings into UTF-8 bytes to actually get UTF-8 when executing the program.