The py2 to py3 transition seems to have gone very poorly, although most of the pain from that is behind us now.

Honestly I blame the community.

The transition was slow (Python 2 was supported in parallel to 3 for a long period of time so there was more than enough time to migrate), relatively easy to do, and brought huge benefits to the ecosystem.

It could have been done and forgotten in 2 years if some community members had not been dicks about it.

It really seemed that the issue was mostly "Unicode is really hard if you haven't thought _deeply_ about it" because application code, library and framework code, _and_ "system" Python code had to go through several iterations of "here's how to do it right" before something reasonable came out that solved issues for most / all stakeholders. And the Swift / Raku people are still sitting on the sidelines smiling, knowing that there are a lot more "lenses" to view text through that Python doesn't make easy (but neither does Haskell, JS, or Java, so there's good company in good-enough-for-now land).

Most of the breaking changes did not justify upgrading.

I blame a lack of tools.

JS devs have been transpiling for years now and it works.

Python should have released a conversion tool that could automatically convert most stuff and identify the stuff it couldn't convert. This kind of directed upgrade would have made the process much easier for developers to actually accomplish.

I'm confused, because isn't that exactly what they did? What was wrong with 2to3?

https://docs.python.org/3/library/2to3.html

It didn't work well at all in my experience. Given how much code was thrown out rather than ported, I'm guessing that I'm not alone.

> Honestly I blame the community.

Sure. The point is that a community can make things go poorly, with or without a BDFL.

> The transition was slow

Here's the timeline the way I think about it:

- 2008-2012 Python 3 becoming usable (byte formatting, six library)

- 2012-2016 Libraries (Django, etc) becoming compatible

- 2016-today Applications (Trac, Ansible, Chrome, etc) becoming compatible.

It took a lot of time for the ecosystem to be ready. Yes, there was a lot of stubbornness, but that's reality.

There are many things that could have been done to make the transition go smoother.

That was a seriously bad call, but it was a single one and he's made a ton of other decisions over the years.

who's "he"?

Guido van Rossum

With a dodgy 2->3 migration pathway and far too many package managers.

And despite that, still a top 3 most popular programming language on the planet. And another in that top 3 is the universally-derided Javascript.

There's a lesson in there to learn. Its unfortunate that the people who need to learn it most likely won't.

It's important to note that JS has an unfair advantage in that if you want to write code that runs on the universal platform, you're forced to use either it or something that transpiles to it. Python reached where it was on merits alone.

(That said, JS is actually a very versatile and almost-great language, getting better all the time)

Python reached where it is because university CS programs which had previously been teaching Java reached for a new language.

Most universities I knew were still teaching Java well into python's rise to popularity a decade ago. Python got where it is by focusing on being simple, easy, and nice to use. Seriously take a look at PEP-20 sometime:

https://peps.python.org/pep-0020/

Things like "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." just was such a breath of fresh air in language design.

I take it they didn't extend that to the package managers :)