[1wd]

There has actually been a lot of focus on making migration less painful, including restoring some removed features, e.g. Python 3.3 has added back the unicode literals. This is limited to things that are actually painful to migrate though not trivial non-issues like the print statement.

[tdicola]

It's not really migration though, it's supporting both python 2 and 3. If you write modules that people depend on you're in a really, really painful spot with the 2 and 3 transition. You can have two completely separate code bases and deal with all the duplication and problems that come with it, or you can try to write code that works with both python 2 and 3 and deal with the huge amount of warts and pain that come with it. Both are painful so it's easy to see why a lot of people just don't even bother trying to support both and ignore 3.

[BuckRogers]

I'm a library consumer not a maintainer, but with info like this- https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/586294700430254080 If you look at the date on the calender, the fact this is still being discussed with virtually no progress like it's still 2008 when 3.0 got released tells me that this is over.

As an end user, I say drop 3.x support in your libraries. The gig is up. If 3 ever takes over, do a 1 time wholesale port and drop 2. Tell people who want 3.x support before then to port and maintain it themselves. Enough complaining.

[IanCal]

> I say drop 3.x support in your libraries. The gig is up. If 3 ever takes over

People dropping 3.x support until 3.x becomes the most used version basically guarantees that it won't take over.

Is this a code equivalent to the bystander effect?

[BuckRogers]

I don't think so. 3 will take over eventually if they don't give up on it. But the issue is that the onus of the labor involved is on those enthusiastic for Python3, and the core dev team.

Few to no one in userspace asked for this problem. For me, it's not a problem. I suspect a lot of people will eventually see it my way. Instead of learning/porting from 2 to 3, they'll stick with 2 and pickup something else like Go. I believe adding Go to my toolbelt was a much better use of my time. While there's other, maybe better, choices than Go, my argument is that it's so easy to learn that it's just about as difficult as the transition/porting of existing projects that Python3 would've been.

I personally gain little to nothing by spending any time on Python3. No amount of features, moving distros to 3 by default, or anything else can convince me. All job prospects 2, and all the libraries support 2. No one cares if my resume has Python3 on it, but adding Golang alongside Python2 opened up a lot of opportunities. If a Python(2) user wanted to spend time on Rust, that would also be a great use of time.

For each person I see demanding Python3 support, I want to see that person spending hours, weeks, months, porting everything they can find to 3 and then maintaining it. Because the rest of us don't care.

For me, Python3 has 1 main feature. It enables you to beg library maintainers to port to 3.

[1wd]

I agree migrating is painful, and supporting both even more so. But not because of print. Migrating print statement usages and even making them work on python 2 and 3 is trivial, even fully automated and statically verifiable.

Compare that to unicode changes, where you need to manually inspect and potentially deeply analyze every single string literal.

Why waste resources making the trivial easier just to please people that will not migrate anyway?