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I don't follow the Python community closely, so I might be totally off the mark here, but my general impression is that it was shipped prematurely. From what I'

I don't follow the Python community closely, so I might be totally off the mark here, but my general impression is that it was shipped prematurely. From what I've read, in more recent years a lot of work has gone into easing the transition... But it seems a bit late. As an outside I wonder: did they fail to put in a reasonable effort at all in providing a smooth transition from the start, or did they try and failed to account to the realities of our world? Recklessly breaking backwards compatibility without a smooth migration plan is hostile to developers. Although it's not a programming language, this is something that I think React has gotten right with their current versioning scheme [0]. [0] https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new-versioning-scheme.html https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/02/19/new-version...

xapata 10y ago
There's a smooth upgrade path via importing from `__future__`, but that doesn't help if you've been ignoring non-text data in your strings. The automatic 2to3 translators don't know what de/encoding you want to use. Upgrading to 3 doesn't cause bugs, it reveals bugs that many people would rather brush under the rug.
ubernostrum 10y ago
Python 3 was shipped with the expectation that the migration would be long. Python 3.0 was the proof-of-concept release, basically, and it wasn't really until 3.3 that momentum started picking up around porting. 3.5 and soon 3.6 are beginning to offer large, attractive new features people want and can't get on 2.7, which further incentivizes the move. But in order to make it happen, and to provide the long lead time for migration, 3.0 had to get out the door when it did. So it wasn't "premature".