Another useful red letter date for language/tool adoption is the standardization of UTF-8 in 1993. Before UTF-8 there were a lot of tools, especially in the POSIX world, that didn't feel comfortable without an 8-bit safe encoding format.
Python 2 was after UTF-8 in 2000, so with hindsight could have had the foresight to pull this bandaid off then (before a large influx of users), but a corresponding complaint about UTF-8 is that because it was 8-bit safe, a lot of tools also felt they could kick the can on dealing with it more directly (as a default), and Python 2 seems to be among them. Hindsight has told us a lot about the problems to expect (and exactly why Python 3 did what it felt it had to do), but they probably weren't as clear in 2000. (In further hindsight, imagine if Astral Plane Emoji had been standard and been common around 2000 instead of 2010 how much further we might be in consistent Unicode implementation today. I suppose that makes 2010 another red letter date for Unicode adoption.)
>
Python 2 was after UTF-8 in 2000, so with hindsight could have had the foresight to pull this bandaid off then
That's true, but I would argue that given the difficulty and backlash we've seen moving from Python 2 to Python 3, such a move would have risked destroying Python's rapid forward momentum and condemned it to the ash heap of programming language history.
To add on to this, I'm not agreeing with the backlash from Python 2 to 3. And I wouldn't want it in the ash heap of history - I definitely think there's a definite place for nice, quick, easy dynamic langs like Python, particularly for exploratory programming.
I'm just saying the move to Python 3 turned out to be a huge deal to a lot of people (it surprised me), and for that reason, trying such a big jump at Python 2 would have been risky and could have derailed Python's forward progress at a critical point.
Would the downvoters like to share their reasons for disagreement?
I think the question goes back to the size and scale of users at the 1 to 2 jump versus the 2 to 3 jump. Python didn't really start to hit most of its "forward progress" in terms of both user adoption and being so deeply integrated into systems. There was no Django for Python 1, for one example. As another example, I'm pretty sure Debian and its heavy reliance on Python for so much of its system scripting didn't happen until Python 2, either, but a quick search didn't turn up a reliable date.
It probably would have been a lot less risky with so many fewer daily users, so many fewer huge projects to migrate.
You may be right. I first used Python on a regular basis in 2002 (after release of Python 2), so I wasn't aware it had so little adoption prior to Python 2. But it definitely was picking up by 2002.
Python 2 was after UTF-8 in 2000, so with hindsight could have had the foresight to pull this bandaid off then (before a large influx of users), but a corresponding complaint about UTF-8 is that because it was 8-bit safe, a lot of tools also felt they could kick the can on dealing with it more directly (as a default), and Python 2 seems to be among them. Hindsight has told us a lot about the problems to expect (and exactly why Python 3 did what it felt it had to do), but they probably weren't as clear in 2000. (In further hindsight, imagine if Astral Plane Emoji had been standard and been common around 2000 instead of 2010 how much further we might be in consistent Unicode implementation today. I suppose that makes 2010 another red letter date for Unicode adoption.)