[maxerickson]

Prior to the release of 3.2 (Feb. 2011, 2.5 years after the initial 3.0), that was clearly reasonable advice. The io subsystem in 3.0 was quite slow, making it uncompetitive with 2.6, and while 3.1 fixed that, there were still too many missing libraries (and similar issues).

I wonder what would have happened if the software that was called 3.0 had been released as "Python 3 Preview Release" or something. I guess the thinking was that would have held people back even more from trying it/porting stuff, but maybe scaling back (end user) expectations for those first couple of versions would have been the better path.