On Fri, 26 Feb 2021 at 23:06, Jim J. Jewett <jimjjew...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I think his point is that most of his students (economics or business, rather > than comp sci) will never need to use Perl or C or Java. Python is friendly > enough to be useful, but this is still a major pain point.
Thanks Jim, that is the situation and yes they are not CS students. The other point though is that it doesn't need to be like this. If the issue was just installing Python and then setting up your PATH then that's manageable. The problem is that even after doing those things there isn't a "one way" to invoke Python from the command line. All possible invocations (python, python3, py, ...) will fail for some users. That's a problem for beginners but it's also a problem in any situation where you want to write a command line that should run on multiple platforms (e.g. in a Makefile or some other kind of script). I see that the official Python tutorial now suggests typing "python3.9" [1]. Is that what is recommended now? Obviously that would fail for someone who had installed 3.8. It would be great if Python could converge around a single way for users to invoke the Python that they have installed and would want to use. Python 2.x is beginning to fade away so python vs python3 makes less sense now but maybe standardising on py for all platforms and installs would be better (since py also has features for selecting different versions and is not currently used for any "system python"). [1]: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/interpreter.html#invoking-the-interpreter Oscar _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/HLMHW7U2UFVQ26NNUXDJGNII6EFDR7AX/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
