[jplayer01]

> Python made the big leap and fixed some huge problems when it went to python 3 - yes it's migration approach was a total fail, but it further cleaned up what was and already clean and consistent language.

People keep saying it was a huge failure, but honestly, I don't see how it was supposed to be done better otherwise. Either you make breaking changes that will impact your entire ecosystem or you don't and live with the same cruft from 20 years ago.

[cesarb]

Rust did it with its "edition" system, where you can freely mix and match modules from the 2015 edition with modules from the 2018 edition. Unfortunately, in the Python 2 to Python 3 transition a fundamental data type (strings) changed, which would make freely mixing Python 2 and Python 3 code much harder.

[CJefferson]

In retrospect, for me many of the problems would have been fixed it they'd wrapped everything in one release, like gcc with the -std flag.

Then once someone had (say) python 2. 6 I'd know they also have python 3.2, and I wouldn't have to figure out that name of the executable to call, it would just be python, with (perhaps) either a command line option or a comment at the top of the file.