Both Lua and Ruby—very embeddable scripting languages—have had excellent track records of forwards compatibility. (Usually requiring extremely simple changes if

Both Lua and Ruby—very embeddable scripting languages—have had excellent track records of forwards compatibility. (Usually requiring extremely simple changes if that.) Python went the way of Perl 5/6 (though to a much lesser extent) with their upgrade and broke several fundamental language features. To this day, I still don't understand the aesthetic reason people seem to prefer Python over something like Ruby. I get all the institutional reasons (Python was adopted by academia), and I get the performance reasons (Python used to be much faster), but with the exception of scientific stuff, the library support is pretty darn identical between the two languages. And, at least among the few people I taught Ruby to that had previous Python experience, every single one said, "oh, this is a lot easier to understand/use." Obviously, opinions are like... well. But my very humble opinion of Python is that its reputation is undeserved, is not as intuitive as a pseudocode language as Ruby is, and frankly I think the really painful, protracted transition from Python 2.6 to 3 is more a product of people who really only understand 1 programming language not wanting to change. (I see it as the modern BASIC.) But I'm not here to start a flame war. Just saying there are other reasonable languages that are easy to learn and much more stable than Python's 2/3 transition.