Things are a lot easier with recent versions of Python 3. Not spending more time on supporting 2/3 compatible codebases was a big mistake in my opinion. I thi

Things are a lot easier with recent versions of Python 3. Not spending more time on supporting 2/3 compatible codebases was a big mistake in my opinion. I think Guido had the idea that everyone was eventually going to run 2to3 and then be done with the conversion. There is too much Python 2 code out there for that to work. Python 2 was too successful and businesses have no inventive to convert working apps. The %-formatting (printf style) for bytes is a big deal (introduced in 3.5). Putting a 'u' prefix in front of text strings and 'b' in front of byte strings will not go a long way in making things work.