"I'm stunned that this 2.x vs 3.x debate is still happening"
The worst thing to me about this transition is what it says about updating existing languages. Python 2 to 3 wasn't that large, really, and look at the resulting screwup, still ongoing. I was on the pro-Python 3.0 side (though I had 0 influence on the decision) and honesty compels me to admit that I never dreamed that it would go down like this. I never would have been pro-3000 if I'd known.
Anyhow, to anyone who has ever read about Go or Clojure or Nimrod or Rust coming out and asked "Why do we need another languge?", the answer is: "Look at Python 3." If you want to tweak anything about an established language, it's almost easier to "just" bring up an entire new language and stack than to fix the old one. And unless our existing languages are Practically Perfect in Every Way... and they're not... we need fixes, which means we need new languages.
The deprecate-warn-remove pattern seems to work well enough for smaller changes.
So maybe it's only when you want to do something as invasive as switching the default string type that things go so sideways, if that is even the right description for Python 3 (which I think you could argue was really about having a better language available in 2015 or 2016 or so, not just being the Python after 2.7).
The worst thing to me about this transition is what it says about updating existing languages. Python 2 to 3 wasn't that large, really, and look at the resulting screwup, still ongoing. I was on the pro-Python 3.0 side (though I had 0 influence on the decision) and honesty compels me to admit that I never dreamed that it would go down like this. I never would have been pro-3000 if I'd known.
Anyhow, to anyone who has ever read about Go or Clojure or Nimrod or Rust coming out and asked "Why do we need another languge?", the answer is: "Look at Python 3." If you want to tweak anything about an established language, it's almost easier to "just" bring up an entire new language and stack than to fix the old one. And unless our existing languages are Practically Perfect in Every Way... and they're not... we need fixes, which means we need new languages.