[davidmanescu]

I hope I don't come across as too obtuse, but it might still make economical sense for the PSF to backpedal on their decision: even if Python3 is a good solution for the future, it's caused years of arguments and still hasn't been adopted by the majority[1].

Ridiculous as it might sound, that implies it would actually take less work to devise a path for Python2 that's backwards compatible but still has a future, and invest the time to backport all 3-only code, than it would to proceed with killing off 2 and porting everything over. It's also nothing more than everyone whose code is 2-only is being asked to do sometime in the future (they chose "the wrong competing standard" and have to pay the cost). Either way someone has to foot the bill for a unified Python but couldn't it just be that the early adopters of 3 could pay that cost if it saves updating (say) twice as much legacy code in favour of backporting the 3-only code?

Of course, the future version of Python should be the best form of the language with the right features, and that's why it was decided to kill off 2, but if after this many years the initiative hasn't completely succeeded, there's always the option to reverse course.

Heck, in the time until Python 2 is officially gone, maybe this new fork will evolve into a better language than 3 and still be backwards-compatible with 2!

For now I'm sticking with 2.7 for as long as I can but will just accept it when the time comes.

[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/vlasovskikh/status/80172061331236... for example (I don't think I've made a controversial claim here but could be wrong)