On Dec 8, 2011, at 7:32 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Having just purged so much cruft from the language, pleas to add some back permanently for a problem that is going to fade from significance within the next couple of years are unlikely to get very far.

This is not a comment on the success of py3, but rather the persistence of old versions of things. Even assuming an awesomely optimistic schedule for py3k migrations, even assuming that *everything* on PyPI supports Py3 by the end of 2013, consider that all around the world, every day, new code is still being written in FORTRAN. Much of it is being in FORTRAN 77, despite the fact that Fotran 90 is now over 20 years old. Efforts still crop up periodically (some successful, some failed) to migrate these "legacy" projects to other languages, some of them as modern as C.

There are plenty of proprietary Python 2 systems which exist today for which there will not be a budget for a Python 3 migration this decade. If history is an accurate guide, people will still be hired to work on python 2.x systems in the year 2100. Some of them will be being hired to migrate that python 2.x code to python 3 (or 4, or 5, whatever we have by then). If they're not, it will be because they're being hired to try to migrate it to Javascript instead, not because the Python 3 migration is "done" by then.