[masklinn]

Sure but importantly they did realise they had erred and course-corrected.

> if it weren't for some dumb decisions like that one there would have been almost no upgrade discontinuity at all

Having been there and done that, nah, the text model changes alone required significant work to square up in most packages. And there were plenty of other semantics changes.

[saurik]

But you could have made those changes incrementally in a way that more cleanly worked across both Python 2 (which already had this split: the default type was just wrong; all of my code, for instance, worked great!... it was just super awkward, as it had tons of u's thrown all over the place). Where they ended up with the language (after, like, 3.7) was much more incremental from Python 2 than the early path to how they got there. To be explicit: it isn't about having to put in upgrade effort, it is about upgrade discontinuity.