It seems to have been serious enough; I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3.
> Please with your substantive comment comment.
I think binning things as drama isn't substantive, particularly when noting about the linked conversation seems dramatic. I also think they're actually talking about the thing you want (pluggable JIT), so the objection seems incongruous.
> I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3.
I assumed Python 2 was pretty much ubiquitous and that the world wasn't adopting Python 3 very quickly for a long time, but I do wonder if the applications I was working with a decade and a half ago (ArcGIS, Blender, Civ4, lots of Red Hat system tools, etc.) biased that viewpoint.
That's debatable. We can't go back in history, but if it were not for ML/data science, I believe python 3 would have killed python. At that time web dev / CLI utilities were major use cases, and that was the time golang became mainstream.
Data science, and then ofc DL being done through python just when python 3 was kinda usable (around 3.3/3.4) was a struck of luck timing-wise.
> Please with your substantive comment comment.
I think binning things as drama isn't substantive, particularly when noting about the linked conversation seems dramatic. I also think they're actually talking about the thing you want (pluggable JIT), so the objection seems incongruous.