> I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Not that many, admittedly. I'

> I am curious, however, how many libraries you actually rely on, given the ease you seem to indicate you were able to move with. Not that many, admittedly. I'm fairly wary of dependencies and prefer to stick to the standard lib unless something is just orders of magnitude better at the job, to cut down on deployment overhead. That attitude has of course benefited me tremendously with the Python 3 transition. That said, I currently use lxml and requests a lot, a long with a bunch of smaller things like python-dateutil and mock (the latter of which was just added to the standard lib in 3.3, actually). Sum total I have maybe 12-15 external libs across my codebases that I didn't write myself, and I've had only one case of an abandoned lib that I needed to port myself. As for my own code, when I started out transitioning I had already cut compatibility with anything older than 2.6, and making things run both on 2.6 and 3.1 turned out to be relatively easy for the most part (certainly with some pain points too however, like needing to abandon syntactic sugar for metaclasses). As the next step I went to 2.7/3.2, which made things even easier. Most of my code now still runs on 2.7 in addition to 3.2, but I'm now starting to abandon the notion of backwards compatibility and introducing code that relies on Python 3.2 and am slowly removing the hacks once required for cross-compat as I find need to touch the respective areas again. Now, I realize that I'm not the norm and that a lot of Python folks out there have a much harder time transitioning. But with the bleakness of your post, I felt compelled to point out that it's not been hell for all of us.