The way I remember it is that people were complaining about all the changes in Py2 that were breaking their code all the time. So it was decided to leave Py2 al

The way I remember it is that people were complaining about all the changes in Py2 that were breaking their code all the time. So it was decided to leave Py2 alone and do all the breaking stuff on Py3. The staticness of Py2 made it an attractive target for new development. As a result Python became very popular. So if they had of just broke everything that very easily could of been the straw the broke the camel's back. Python would not of achieved the popularity it did. I think the fundamental error here was the idea that languages become popular because of some fundamental quality of the language as a language. That never really happens. It is always something else. In the case of Python it was the "Batteries Included" thing. It came with a whole whack of functionality in the form of libraries written in other languages. No one much cared about the details of the framework for getting at that functionality.