[anoctopus]

Sure it's easy to fix, but it made a ton of scripts stop working despite being otherwise unaffected by the version change, all for the sake of a small syntax change. Unicode strings are a much bigger change and required some effort to fix, but it improved the language semantics while the print change rendered lots of scripts incompatible for no good reason. Just deprecating the old syntax and giving tons of warnings for a while before dropping it would have been much better.

[smcl]

I totally get you and I genuinely agree, it probably wasn't something so important to risk pissing people off over. As the sister comment to yours mentioned it could be seen as a bit of a "fuck you" to maintenance devs, but if we're honest with ourselves the reason that people haven't moved to Python 3.x after 7+ years isn't really due to print().

edit: sorry I hit "flag" instead of "parent" when trying to navigate back, hope that didn't affect anything (I've since unflagged)

[TylerE]

Ultimately, I think Python 3 had exactly the wrong amount of breakage. They either should have broken way less (e.g., let 2.x code run largely unchanged if it didn't deal closely with unicode) or should have broken more, to give more of carrot... like if some of the new async stuff could have been available in 3.0, that would have given some people a reason to move right away.

[freehunter]

I kind of feel like that's why print changed. It's going to be used in almost every Python script at some point in time, so it forces a breaking change without causing a seriously major break by itself. It's enough to make your script need to be updated, but not enough to make you re-write it from scratch (possibly in another language).