Is 3.0 worth breaking backward compatibility?

[bearophileHUGS at lycos.com]

walterbyrd:
> I can not think of anything that is being changed that was really a "show stopper" anyway.<

I agree, but Python and its culture has a characteristic that not many
other languages share: it tries to be a tidy language, to have one
obvious way to do most things, it values readability and sometimes
even elegance.

So even if those problems aren't "showstoppers" for most languages,
for the Python culture they are bad enough to need a fix. The amount
of warts in the language that a Python programmer is used to tolerate
in the the language is probably 1/20 of the warts a C++ programmer
digests with no problem every day.

Different languages, different cultures, and sometimes even different
psychology & cognitive profile of the programmer.

Bye,
bearophile