So, the problem is that the Python developers - in my opinion unneccessarily - broke backwards compatibility. There are two main problems - the print function,

So, the problem is that the Python developers - in my opinion unneccessarily - broke backwards compatibility. There are two main problems - the print function, and str/unicode. They could just add two or three things, and I'd be completely satisfied. I hope they are self-descriptive: from __past__ import print_statement import unicode_string as str, bytestring as bytes import unicode_string as unicode, bytestring as str from python2 import legacy_module ... or equivalent comment options (a la "coding: utf8"), or iterpreter flags, or something like that. Perl 6 manages to load Perl 5, I don't see why this shouldn't be possible in Python. Now you might say this is petty, why get worked up by something as minor as the print statement. But just because it is so minor, it feels so unneccessary and petty to remove it. The str/unicode switch was also not handled optimally. There is a lot of code still broken. I just ported some code to Python 3 which uses Twisted, and found the FTP implementation does not work in Python3. It turns out this is really hard to fix, because FTP is not encoding aware, and bytestrings "I dont care right now what encoding this is"-strings are second class citizens in Python3. It's a bit unfortunate that the Python developers get to decide what is defined as Python and what not. When something gets big, I believe you get certain responsibilites. You shouldn't just "break the world" and strand lots of developers in 2008. That they even published a PEP stating there will be no Python 2.8 is silly and mean. To end on a hopeful note: Why won't someone make a Kickstarter... if you manage to get full support for loading Python 2 modules into the current, main CPython 3 codebase (upstream), I'd be willing to pay, say, 100€. I'm sure some companies with legacy codebases would like to chip in.