> As someone who wasn't around for the Python 2->3 transition, what made it so painful?
All the people who screamed and yelled so much that they prevented Python 2 from having significant breaking changes. That meant that the needed changes kept piling up until the list was gigantic.
People forget that the Python 3 thing wasn't done in a vacuum. All the important people in Python had direct memory from the upgrade of Python 1 to Python 2 and what a big fiasco that was.
So many people dragged their feet on that that Guido et al. made a point of making 3.0 have hard, breaking changes in an attempt to force the upgrade through in a timely fashion instead of the long, drawn out, painful process that was the Python 1 to Python 2 change.
We all know, in hindsight, that the forces of inertia were FAR more intransigent than Guido and Co. estimated. However, that wasn't obvious looking forward.
I'm not sure there was any good solution. People would have pissed and moaned no matter what.
IMHO there was a good solution - launching python 3.0 only when you had a working solution to make a library that is usable in both python2 and python3 code, as was possible later on, and what IMHO was a key factor in making the migration actually work.
I don't think "intransigent" is a fair description. At the end of the day, Python 3 was a different language from Python 2, and people weren't going to switch languages if there wasn't a benefit to them. That's a perfectly reasonable position. The Python dev team extended the end of life date for Python 2 from 2015 to 2020 because they realized that Python 3 simply hadn't advanced enough by 2015 to make it worth while for all the Python 2 users to switch.
All the people who screamed and yelled so much that they prevented Python 2 from having significant breaking changes. That meant that the needed changes kept piling up until the list was gigantic.
People forget that the Python 3 thing wasn't done in a vacuum. All the important people in Python had direct memory from the upgrade of Python 1 to Python 2 and what a big fiasco that was.
So many people dragged their feet on that that Guido et al. made a point of making 3.0 have hard, breaking changes in an attempt to force the upgrade through in a timely fashion instead of the long, drawn out, painful process that was the Python 1 to Python 2 change.
We all know, in hindsight, that the forces of inertia were FAR more intransigent than Guido and Co. estimated. However, that wasn't obvious looking forward.
I'm not sure there was any good solution. People would have pissed and moaned no matter what.