this is cool but I do get annoyed when an explanatory piece explicitly divides the audience according to who does and doesn't know the trick and says of the latter "at this point some of you will be spluttering"... well-written in general but it is important not to alienate people who don't get it yet.

I was really confused at his example here, so I drew this:

http://i.imgur.com/NBVPiCE.png

then I realized that his example was meant to be interpreted as a single disconnected graph, rather than two separate examples.

To be fair we've ingested a fair amount of python 2.7 research code for our Python 3 codebase and the print statements are the quickest of fixes. There are rarer actual gotchas, but 2to3 catches a fair number of them. We only switched for the machine learning project I'm working on right now as an experiment, but it's surprising how smoothly it's gone.

I'm not talking about it being a bug that needs a fix. That is easy enough in existing code. Im talking about when you are using Python like Matlab or Mathematica. Analyzing data and quickly viewing the results or subsets of the results.

You should probably use Jupyter notebook if you don't use it already. It's great for exploratory coding like data analysis. And as the last evaluated expression of a code block is automatically printed, no need for a print statement.

Standardization is generally distinct from whether something counts as a language or not. English lacked standardization for centuries (almost a millennium if you count it right) after it became a distinct language.