> it isn't like there was any choice on that matter

There was another choice. This is what I mean: however bad you think py2->py3 was, people are using py3 now unless they've got really good reasons not to and are prepared to suffer. When it came to perl5/6, it turns out over time most people choose "neither".

SUSE didn't update the link like others did so it's not really that py2 is the default, but python2 was always named python. It's going away anyway: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP3/in...

The “neither” choice happened with Python 2/3 as well. The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend. Long before that, before the Python 3 transition, there was a significant amount of buzz around everything from web frameworks to desktop GUI applications. The way I remember it, almost all of that attention was killed during the transition, when people tried Python and found a significantly lacking and confusing ecosystem.

"The current re-emergence of Python as a machine learning/data science languages is basically a new trend"

This new trend is about a decade old by now. Pandas was released in 2011, numpy in 1995. Google released Tensorflow to the public in 2015.

it was a trend made possible by numpy and scipy being built for a decade before the phrase 'deep learning' was coined. it had just the right mix to blow up: easy to read, easy to write, batteries included.

it wasn't inevitable, but it was damn likely.

> there was a significant amount of buzz around ... desktop GUI applications

As someone who is still supporting multiple desktop GUI applications in python, what did they pick instead? I'd love move off Python, but nothing else seemed to have the proper maturity.

Seems like today's standard pick is Electron.

> There was another choice.

Only if you count "not making a choice" (ie. staying with Python 2) as a choice. But this isn't really practical since everything else is pushed towards Python 3.