> Nobody is going to tell you that Python 2->3 wasn't excruciatingly painful but it's hard to argue with the result. Sometimes you have to rip the bandaid off. Python 3 is by far the better language.

It's not “by far”, the weird part is that they broke backwards compatibility but also didn't fix some of the other issues and many of the fixes didn't need backwards compatibility to be broken and most of all, the way Python works would allow code written in multiple versions to interact and they should absolutely have allowed that and allow Python3 code to call Python2 modules.

> You're right the "commercial" timeline of Python would have supported Python 2 forever because big paying clients demand it but I think that would have led to a worse outcome for the OSS community.

The cost of switching was ridiculous and it still is. “venv” needing to exist is symptomatic of the bizarre ecosystem and developers being expected to maintain like 6 different versions of the same library at times and when they don't as user you are screwed.

With Rust, multiple editions can just compile together. Crates written in one edition can be called from code written in another edition.

Also, the optimism just highlighted how out of touch they were, that they thought people would actually just rewrite everything in 5 years is bizarre and suggests a fundamental lack of understanding to me. Same thing with Wayland and GPLv3 to me. This is so common in the FOSS world. People come with a new version and just expect that everyone will quickly switch because they consider their new version better, not realizing that A) even if others think it's better, they still won't “just switch” because that costs time and money and B), very often they don't even think it's better which they never bothered to even investigate before they got started. They just assumed that everyone will agree because the “I have no idea what Xfce is or does, sorry.” people are completely out of touch with the world to be honest and it's pretty clear they're often living in some very specific online bubble and don't understand the concerns of companies, users, and just everyone outside of their own little bubble.