Ruby did something like this around the same time Python did. Ruby's was a bit smaller, but overall a roughly similar amount of breaking changes. They forced yo

Ruby did something like this around the same time Python did. Ruby's was a bit smaller, but overall a roughly similar amount of breaking changes. They forced you to think about encodings more with Strings, they changed the signatures of several operators, they changed some of the syntax for case statements, they drastically changed the scope rules for block variables, they restructured the base object hierarchy, etc. In both cases, it was a deliberate decision to make a clean break. I think Ruby's big break didn't make as big a schism mainly because Rails was very supportive, and Rails holds an enormous amount of influence in the Ruby world. If Python 3 had been introduced as a separate language, I'm pretty sure everyone would have said "Why isn't this just called Python 3? It's 99.9% the same as Python and it's by the same people and they're deprecating Python in favor of it."