If 90% of apps necessary for normal life are only available as poor web versions it drives obsolescence no matter what the remaining 10% do.
Web apps is better than native as they are automatically running the latest version, platform independent (windows, mac, linux, android, ios), in some sense more secure. Instead of asking people to write more native apps, I think we should rather ask them to write more quality web apps if they don't need native capabilities.
As an example, see Atom vs VSCode. We thought building a code editor with electron will lead to something slow like Atom, but m$ later proved that it is possible to build something fast. Perhaps not as simple as native, but it can be done.
yes.
one of the changes (and in my experience, the most problematic change) was the removal of the keyword "print"
it was a poor choice at the start to treat "print" like a keyword. it is a simple, breaking change to remove it, easily automated (ps: just add brackets), and now the language is more consistent and flexible.
The only reason to keep it is to not "touch" things. but it is easily mitigated, so that isnt a good enough reason imo. I much prefer a consistent language.
otherwise I'd stick with PHP.
By a python programmer, sure.
By another programmer, ok.
By your grandpa that just wants to run that python script to organize his stamp collection that has worked for decades? No.
For something as popular as python there will be thousands such people. Stuff that will simply NOT get fixed.
But that cost is easily ignored by the original developers.
It may be from a pure economic perspective focused on a business that can socialize externalities. Sometimes new developments reduces development time. On the other hand, the externalities of that is that a modern computer performs worse running equivalent tasks today in the browser than a native app 15 years ago on hardware from that time. Lucky for businesses that they aren't held responsible for the ewaste they helped produce.