I actually agree that it damaged the Python ecosystem, at least in the short term. It certainly did have a negative effect on Python momentum that will be felt

I actually agree that it damaged the Python ecosystem, at least in the short term. It certainly did have a negative effect on Python momentum that will be felt for some time to come. I believe the Python developers anticipated this, struggled with it, but did it anyway because they believed it to be the right call in the long run. I'm hoping they will be right, because I do enjoy programming in Python 3 more than I did programming in 2. Would it have been a better call to work on problems like the GIL instead? Perhaps. Certainly many, yourself included, would consider that a more significant problem to solve than the comparatively minor touchups that Python 3 did to the language. However, I do tend to disagree there: I think that the slow accretion of cruft that bogs down a language over time is a more significant problem and more likely to cause a language to fall out of favor. And I think the timing works out in such a way that Python can recover the lost momentum from the transition in time for projects like PyPy to come up with a good answer to the GIL. So, yeah, we disagree ultimately, but thank you for explaining your POV better. Upvoted. > Every language bump (whether 2.5 to 2.6 or 2.7 to 3.0) has meant additional work for the developers of alternative implementations [...] This is true, but I'd say the core Python developers haven't been entirely blind to this concern, cf. the 2 year moratorium.