No, my claim is that, while ceasing development of the language Python 2 is wholly sensible, ceasing development of the implementation Python 2 (CPython specifically) is not (due the almost certain existence of latent bugs). My "mumble" at the end was meant exactly in reference to that.

I suppose one could argue that, the CPython implementation is the language specification. (And I seem to recall hearing that notion somewhere years ago.) In which case, it would not be possible to freeze development of the language without freezing the implementation as well. There are various reasons I wholeheartedly disagree with such a characterization, but I guess there's some self-consistency there at least.

> ceasing development of the language Python 2 is wholly sensible, ceasing development of the implementation Python 2 (CPython specifically) is not

Development of CPython 2 has ended, bugs and all. It's past its end of life, this is well known and has been known for a long time. Any remaining bugs are the problem of the users, not the responsibility of the former developers.

Sure people will fork it and do stuff with those forks, but those will no longer be new versions of CPython, they will be new versions of some-fork-of-CPython.

This is clear, but does the cpython team want to maintain Python2? If not, either it’s time to use an alternative or move on....

> So your claim is that "Python 2" is a language spec, not an implementation? And that there will be future releases of this language spec in the future?

PyPy maintains a Python 2 implementation and will continue to do so.

> "Python 2" is a language spec

Cython, IronPython, Brython, Stackless Python, Nuitka, etc.