On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 7:32 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > Chris Angelico <rosuav <at> gmail.com> writes: >> >> On Tue, Jan 7, 2014 at 3:29 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis <at> pitrou.net> > wrote: >> > People don't use? According to available figures, there are more > downloads of >> > Python 3 than downloads of Python 2 (Windows installers, mostly): >> > http://www.python.org/webstats/ >> > >> >> Unfortunately, that has a massive inherent bias, because there are >> Python builds available in most Linux distributions - and stats from >> those (like Debian's popcon) will be nearly as useless, because a lot >> of them will install one or the other (probably 2.x) without waiting >> for the user (so either they'll skew in favour of the one installed, >> or in favour of the one NOT installed, because that's the only one >> that'll be explicitly requested). It's probably fairly accurate for >> Windows stats, though, since most people who want Python on Windows >> are going to come to python.org for an installer. > > Agreed, but it's enough to rebut the claim that "people don't use > Python 3". More than one million Python 3.3 downloads per month under > Windows is a very respectable number (no 2.x release seems to reach > that level).
Sure. The absolute number is useful; I just don't think the relative number is - you started by talking about there being "more downloads of Python 3 than downloads of Python 2", and it's that comparison that I think is unfair. But the absolute numbers are definitely significant. I'm not quite sure how to interpret the non-link lines in [1] but I see the month of December showing roughly 1.2 million Python 3.3.3 downloads for Windows - interestingly, split almost fifty-fifty between 64-bit and 32-bit installs - and just over one million Python 2.7.6 installs. That's one month, two million installations of Python. That's 73,021 *per day* for the month of December. That is a lot of Python. ChrisA [1] http://www.python.org/webstats/usage_201312.html#TOPURLS -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
