Why are there two active versions?

I will quote the reason from the official Python website:

"Guido van Rossum (the original creator of the Python language) decided to clean up Python 2.x properly, with less regard for backwards compatibility than is the case for new releases in the 2.x range. The most drastic improvement is the better Unicode support (with all text strings being Unicode by default) as well as saner bytes/Unicode separation.

"Besides, several aspects of the core language (such as print and exec being statements, integers using floor pision) have been adjusted to be easier for newcomers to learn and to be more consistent with the rest of the language, and old cruft has been removed (for example, all classes are now new-style, "range()" returns a memory efficient iterable, not a list as in 2.x)."

You can read more about this topic at https://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3.