> Could they have at least minimised the blast radius? For example, make all of the text/Unicode changes for Python 3 and thats it. Most of the other changes w

> Could they have at least minimised the blast radius? For example, make all of the text/Unicode changes for Python 3 and thats it. Most of the other changes were kind of trivial though. print → print(), some stdlib name changes: that's easy stuff; you can automate that, even provide a compatibility shim. The division operator was a bit more tricky, but I never encountered code that broke due to it (although I'm sure some did, it didn't seem like a wide-spread issue). Plus you could do most of these things in Python 2. > It seems that a bunch of changes were made all at once because it was already going to be incompatible so let’s take the opportunity to clean up as much as possible. You should have seen the initial discussions surrounding Python 3000, as it was called back then. The most common thing Guido had to say was "No, that's far too large of a change, we're not designing a new language", even for things where it was agreed on that the situation wasn't ideal. The community came up with some pretty wild proposals, and a lot was kept out of Python 3.