Anecdotally, I stopped using python for several years around the transition period from 2 to 3 because a number of libraries I used at the time were in flux with 3 support (beautiful soup I _think_ was one? I could be misremembering). Ironically, I ended up just using perl for a scraping tool instead, which it's quite good at for quick and dirty scraping scripts (PCRE.) Nowadays I use ruby for that type of stuff...