Was the move to Python 2.0 as big a deal?

[Jason Scheirer]

On Jun 14, 9:35 am, John Salerno <johnj... at gmailNOSPAM.com> wrote:
> Just curious if people put up any resistance to 2.0 like some people do
> for 3.0. Was it as big of a change in the language, or was the
> transition smoother? It seems silly for anyone to say they would prefer
> to stick with 1.x versions at this point, so perhaps we'll get there
> with 3.0 eventually too.
>
> Anyway, I'm just trying to figure out if the whole "I don't like 3.0"
> mentality (of some people, not all of course) is merely a result of it
> still being new and not even released yet, and will completely go away
> after a year or two; or if there really are such drastic changes that
> people won't want to adopt it at all.

A lot of the bigger changes and warts that have emerged in the past
decade or so of the 2.0 series (text encoding madness anyone?) have
been tabled until the 3.0 transition, so any compatibility breaks for
the sake of fixing inconsistencies and ugliness in Python have been
accruing and are finally being applied in 3.0. The 1.5->2.0 transition
was a little strange, but I think a large reason that it was less
painful was because the language was younger, less established and had
far fewer people programming in it (and correspondingly smaller
codebases) to transition over.