The irony is that what's keeping Python from moving forward is its own ecosystem. PyPi makes it so easy to just add small libraries as dependencies to your pro

The irony is that what's keeping Python from moving forward is its own ecosystem. PyPi makes it so easy to just add small libraries as dependencies to your project. This is part of what I like about it, but it comes with a cost - this exact problem. I actually find the unicode thing a good enough reason to move to Py3, and porting my company's own code is hardly and issue. But I just had a quick look at how much of our dependencies support Py3. No surprise - we can't move. Not without porting a huge amount of code we don't know by ourselves and hoping the pull requests get merged, or by dropping big dependencies from our code. How big? Thrift, boto, MySQL-python, hiredis (the native C redis connection layer), fabric, mrjob - just to name a few. Some of these have big non compatible dependency trees themselves. Neither of those are going to happen. So not having a big enough incentive is not my problem here. The price of migrating is simply too big compared to the incentives. I think the only big enough incentive that would cause me to consider replacing or porting all this huge chunk of dependencies, is something indeed along the lines of GIL-less massive concurrency a-la Go. But that doesn't seem to be happening any time in the foreseeable future. Python 2.8 is a good idea for me as a user, but it will only persist the problem, not solve it. I don't have any better idea other than Python should grow one huge carrot to create a tipping point, and enough pressure on library maintainers to hop on.