I pretty much agree with this article. Anyone who complains about updating their code hasn't done it: upgrading code from Python 2 to Python 3 is dead simple.

I pretty much agree with this article. Anyone who complains about updating their code hasn't done it: upgrading code from Python 2 to Python 3 is dead simple. I've migrated a few large projects manually (not using 2to3 because I wanted to be sure relevant areas of the code were tested). None of these took more than a few hours. Writing code that is compatible with both Python 2 and 3 is a little bit harder, but it's still not prohibitively difficult. The fact that difficulty of migration is still cited as the main reason for not migrating shows that people simply aren't trying it. So we really have to look at why people aren't trying to migrate. It seems pretty clear to me that people don't see incentives for the change. There's just not enough different about Python 3. And the author is spot on talking about improving the standard libraries, although I think where they could really get a big win is not necessarily by improving the existing libraries, but by adding new libraries. The thing that got me excited about Python in the first place was the "batteries included" nature of the standard library: so much of what I wanted to do was just an import away. And I'm not the only one who felt that way[1]. But there are tons of holes in the standard library that could be filled with simple wrappers around existing open-source tools or by implementing public standards. Just ones I've run into recently: BSON, AES, RSA. Python supporst SQLite, but what about baking in support for PostgreSQL or MySQL? What about building in a templating engine? [1] http://xkcd.com/353/ http://xkcd.com/353/