[kylebgorman]

This post seems to conflate language and implementation. IMO, Python 3 the language has tons of improvements and no regressions. The grief on the internet about Python 3 makes me seriously wonder how many people who don't like Python 3 have actually tried it yet. (There are legitimate critiques of Python 3, but they're few on the ground and none are presented here.)

The suggestions in this post are mostly changes to the implementation (i.e., make it go faster), not the language itself. While CPython 2.7 and CPython 3.4 (implementations) surely have interesting implementational differences that don't boil down to just language changes, I'm not aware of them.

[netheril96]

The idea that language and its implementation can be separated is only theoretical. In practice, the adoption of a certain language is highly influenced by its implementation (and ecosystem).

The language improvements are nice. I know this because I started with Python 3 then switched to Python 2 and missed some of the goodies now and then. But the language improvements are not enough to overcome the breakage of backwards compatibility. Only a vastly improved implementation (that is not backported to Python 2.7) will.

[kylebgorman]

Python is notable among its peers in that it has a well-defined spec that is not just a list of bugs in the reference interpreter. It is thus important to note that some of the non-reference interpreters do already have the properties requested in TFA, but for whatever reason they haven't supplanted the reference implementation. (I suspect that the ability to drop down into C/C++, link against preexisting libs, or use tools like Cython and taking advantage of the compiler's optimizer, is actually more important than, say, the average PyPy speed boost. Certainly it is for me.)