[takeda]

I don't know what it supposed to prove. It was no secret that Unicode was what broke compatibility, the other changes were there to use that as an opportunity to fix warts that accumulated over years (like organization of system packages, print statement, division, classes etc. I don't believe Thauton fixed these things though)

It was no secret that everything else was portable, that's essentially all what python 2.7 was - backporting 3.x features to Python 2. It was a waste of resources for developers to maintain 2 forks of Python so that effort was stopped in 2015. There was 5 extra years to move application to Python 3.

5 years is frigging long time in computer terms, and your project felt still like giving f-you to the core developers for trying to improve the language. Trying to call the project Python 2.8 was very aggressive and would create a lot of confusion if Guido would accept that.

I'm glad you gave python 3 a try, I feel like the people that were against it didn't write any new application in it, and their experience was porting Python 2 code to 3. It can be very frustrating when Python 3 complains about bugs that Python 2 just ignored, but if you write a python 3 application from scratch you don't even notice the Unicode, and that was the goal.

[ehsankia]

Some of the changes I feel were a step too far though. Completely removing iter{items,values,keys} just made the migration so much more painful. I would say I spend a significant amount of time figuring out if I want to rely on six or if the array is small enough that I can live with unoptimal .items() in py2 throughout the migration. What would've been the issue of keeping .iter*() calls around, with a warning maybe? In general, there's a lot of stuff that could've been kept for backward compatibility, with a warning. It's much easier to slowly fix issues like that over time as you maintain code than to have to convert it all in one go, which put a giant barrier for people want to switch.

[takeda]

pylint --py3k found many of these, and mypy the rest (granted you had to specify proper types)

But I agree, the warning would be a good idea.