I was doing the Exploring Student Data Project in the “Data Scientist: Machine Learning” course and it didn’t say that I should do it on my computer, but I usually do all the projects on my computer.
I was curious so I checked the version of Codecademy’s Pandas it was version 0.25.3 from 2017 for reference the latest version is 2.2.1.
While it does make things easier an update would be nice : )
ver 0.25.3 came out in Oct. 2019. Is it throwing any errors? Any deprecated methods that negatively affect the project? The version of Python is 3.6.9, which isn’t recent either (it’s eol was 12.23.21) but I don’t think it matters much.
FWIW, personally, I don’t have the latest Pandas version either (1.5.3 Jan 2023)
FWIW, as you’re going through the literature of the latest version you have on your machine, it is important to note any new features, and when they came into being. If you are not using those features in your code, then it should still run properly in older installed environments.
The newer the enhancements, the less older versions will recognize them. To get a complete picture one would need to spend a Saturday going through the version information on python.org.
As for it being our own machine, we have control over maintenance and upgrades. The engineers that built the codebase for the LE are mostly long gone. CC doesn’t have the motivation (pressure from the marketplace) to upgrade their older offerings, and are no doubt doing needs based assessments. The most pressure is on the development team to deliver new products, and that is a repeating cycle we have seen for many years. Why change now?
Lets not overlook the obvious real-world implications here, either.
Anyone who wants to do anything code related professionally is going to encounter old versions of ${insert_dependency/software/platform/whatever_here} and will likely need to figure out how to get it work with something else, or how to update it, etc etc. This doesn’t seem any different.
There’s always something old lurking in a project somewhere, so might as well get used to it. 
fair point, but still a upgrade would be nice