What's stopping people from forking the language at python 2.7? Let the pythonistas add whatever feature they feel like while people who need stability use "Fortran python" or whatever.
Probably most of the people who like writing language interpreters understood that Python 3 fixed a lot of mistakes, so it would be funner to work on.
Though I'm surprised nobody really wrote a transitional fork (six gets you a lot of the way but "Python 2.8 which has _just_ the str/bytes change" would have been useful).
Ultimately Python 2 isn't a better language, it's just the language everyone's code was in...
In my fantasy-py language, there is no "str", base types would be explicit. unicode() bytes(). "something" could have an implicit u"". Composite types could be explicit. If I want a set of int's, I can use mypy now to s1: t.Set[int] = set(), but that's just linting.
I truly wish this would become a thing. It's really frustrating having to update my installed packages and my code for some stupid change the language designers thought is sooo worth it. Just stabilize the bloody thing so I can do some work. Updating code so it meshes with the "latest and greatest" is _not real work_.
Fixing the entirely broken string/bytes mess up in Python 2 was worth it by itself. For bonus points old style classes went away, and the language got a significant speed boost. And now it’s not going to die a slow death, choking on the past poor decisions it’s burdened with.
Trivializing that by suggesting it was some offhand, unneeded solution to a problem that some dreamy “language designer” thought up is at best completely and utterly ignorant.
Also maintenance, in all forms, is work. That does involve updating your systems from time to time.
Maybe it's work if you get paid by lines of code and JIRA tickets but programming is just a tool for me to my real work done. So I would like to spend as little time programming as I possibly can.
Nobody here gets paid per Jira ticket or line of code.
Sure, if you don’t program and just write ad-hoc (unmaintainable?) scripts then the transition is annoying. But it’s also not required. Don’t re-write your scripts, you can always ensure that Python 2 is present.
But if you’re maintaining a project that uses the wider ecosystem, then you are at the mercy of that ecosystem. And, at the time of the decision to make Python 3, that ecosystem was saying “Python 2 has a lot of horrible legacy decisions that make it harder than it should be to write good code”.
Containers or environment management solve this problem quite easily. All of my major projects have a conda environment alongside them, and I expect I'll be shifting things over to Docker containers as my org starts shifting things to the cloud.
