‫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.