[adamc]

That was, in many ways, a crazy difficult transition. I don't think most languages have gone through such a thing. Perl tried and died. So I don't agree that it reflects poorly on the community; I think the plan itself was too ambitious.

[dagmx]

Many languages have. There were significant breaks in C++ when stringabi changed, Swift has had major language changes, rust has editions.

The difference is in what motivates getting to the other end of that transition bump and how big the bump is. That’s why it took till past 2.7’s EOL to actually get people on to 3 in a big way because they’d drag their feet if they don’t see a big enough change.

Compiled languages have it easier because they don’t need to mix source between dependencies, they just have to be ABI compatible.