I saw on this tweet that Google Colab move to Python 3.7 on February 2021. As of today however (January 2022), Python 3.10 is out, but Colab still runs Python 3.7.
My (voluntarily) naive take is that this is quite a significant lag.
Why are they not at least on Python 3.8 or even 3.9?
Is it simply to make sure that some compatibility criteria are met?
The only reason is they want to have the most compatible version of Python worldwide. Based on the Python Readiness report (Python 3.7 Readiness), version 3.7 supports almost 80.6% of the most used packages so far. Still, this coverage is 78.3% for version 3.8, 70.6% for version 3.9 and 49.7% for version 3.10 (as of March 29, 2022).
Frankly, if Python 3.6 was not in its EOL, they still used this version today. Lucky us, which python.org decide to rid of versions below 3.7.
On the other hand, You can update the Python version in your Colab by running some Linux commands in the notebook. But the problem is that whenever you start a new notebook, google ignores the updates and will turn back to the original version.
The best action that google can have is to have options to select the python version. Because of this, I am not using Colab in most cases, especially when I am teaching Python to my students.
