Alternatives don't help when some other project depend on a package that is not fully ported. And this is a problem. It is still a bit harder to quickly build something using Python 3.x. Check trending Python repos for this month:
* portia doesn't work in 3.x because of scrapy, twisted and scrapely;
* psdash - developers don't care;
* jasper-client - developers don't care;
* ansible - Paramico was not ported when development started, now it is a big task to port ansible;
* scrapy - depends on twisted;
* heartbleed-masstest - developers don't care;
* planout - developers don't care;
* beets - not sure what's the reason, either some dependencies or developers don't care;
* reddit - no reason to move for 3.x for a large codebase which is not a library;
* salt - docs says it needs Python < 3 (maybe the reason is similar to ansible's);
* pacemaker - developers don't care;
* pyjvm - developers don't care;
* sentry - large codebase which is not a library.
That's not bad (12 trending packages have 3.x support, 13 don't). But clearly something stops some new packages from starting in py3, and many packages that people find interesting don't work in 3.x. I think that the only way to improve this is to help porting "base" packages that ecosystems depend on; just providing alternatives is usually not a good answer.
Cool about psdash, the commit didn't exist when I started to write the comment :)
Twisted and Scrapy are getting ported, and the community is moving forward. But this is not happening because of a miracle - people are making it happen. My point was not that Python 3.x is bad (I think it is good), it was that community still needs help, that writing alternative software is not the best way to do it, and that there are still reasons why writing new Python 2.x code is easier.
Praising 3.x won't make users switch if they need some unported package, and bashing 3.x won't make other people's lives easier either. So let's help twisted, scrapy and other modules to become 3.x compatible.
Scrapy reached an important milestone recently - its test runner can now run tests under Python 3.x; test runner was the main reason why porting haven't really started before. If anybody wants to help then ping me kmike84 at gmail.com, or check https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy/pull/682, or go to ScrapingHub booth at PyCon and talk to people there.
The reason is probably because most people are still more confident writing in Python 2 and many users are using Python 2. Though many of the simple programs really don't require advance features which are only available in python 3. In other words, many of the new projects can be Python 2 and 3 compatible without effort.
* portia doesn't work in 3.x because of scrapy, twisted and scrapely;
* psdash - developers don't care;
* jasper-client - developers don't care;
* ansible - Paramico was not ported when development started, now it is a big task to port ansible;
* scrapy - depends on twisted;
* heartbleed-masstest - developers don't care;
* planout - developers don't care;
* beets - not sure what's the reason, either some dependencies or developers don't care;
* reddit - no reason to move for 3.x for a large codebase which is not a library;
* salt - docs says it needs Python < 3 (maybe the reason is similar to ansible's);
* pacemaker - developers don't care;
* pyjvm - developers don't care;
* sentry - large codebase which is not a library.
That's not bad (12 trending packages have 3.x support, 13 don't). But clearly something stops some new packages from starting in py3, and many packages that people find interesting don't work in 3.x. I think that the only way to improve this is to help porting "base" packages that ecosystems depend on; just providing alternatives is usually not a good answer.