[stickfigure]

Be careful what you wish for. The extreme alternative is Java, whose slavish obsession with backwards compatibility has effectively crippled the language. There's enough cruft in the standard library to keep newbies guessing for years, plus fundamental language design failures like type erasure and "beans".

At some point you need to burn bridges in order to move forward. Doing this frequently destroys the community. Never doing it also destroys the community, it just takes longer.

Personally, I think Python is managing pretty well. Yes, it's occasionally painful, but it's less painful than stagnation.

[malandrew]

This exact point is the basis for semantic versioning. Major version changes, e.g. 2.x.x to 3.x.x is expected to break backwards compatibility for the sake of progress. If you are happy with 2.x.x. stick with it, just don't expect any new features, just maintenance in the language and libraries built around it.

http://semver.org

[Too]

I don't think C# ever broke backwards compatibility and they have no problems adding plenty of nice features every release.

[human_error]

I think in Python's case there was really no compelling reason to burn the bridges between 2 and 3. Burning the bridges should be done when something will be significantly improved.

[dbaupp]

Python's Unicode support was significantly improved between 2 and 3.

[slurgfest]

I write a fair amount of Python 3 and I don't agree at all.

If your concern is that code written for 2.x won't work in the future, it will be some years until 2.7 is no longer getting security fixes etc. The mere existence of 3.x doesn't prevent you from using 2.7.

[cjdrake]

Well said.