“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(

I do understand people's points about "the age of outrage" and "internet 2018" but still: the PEP wasn't generally accepted as being a fantastic improvement, so why did he feel the need to fight so hard for it?

Interestingly, C++ is going through the same process, with lots of great ideas being proposed, but the sum total of them being an even more complicated language (on top of what is probably the most complicated language already).

Python has been successful, IMHO, because Guido has made several brave, controversial calls. Python 3 breakage and async turned out to be prescient, fantastic decisions.

The jury is still out on the Python 3 decision, to be honest. Heck, Python 2 is still officially supported until 2020.

Python 3 adoption is increasing, but the instability and breakage that it introduced caused a lot of knock-on effects throughout the Python community that held it back and hindered its adoption and mindshare. It'll take a while before we can really say whether the long-term gains will make up for that.