Perl6/Raku killed Perl.
Python 3 almost killed Python.
It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.
replies(6):
Python 3 almost killed Python.
It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.
People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.
Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3, intel->amd->graviton.
At that scale all those changes are a big deal. Heck even the pickle protocol change in Python 3.8 was a big deal for us. I wouldn't characterize the python 2->3 transition as a significantly bigger deal than some of the others. In many ways it was easier because so much hay was made about it there was a lot of knowledge and tooling.
They should've just used Python 2's strings as UTF-8. No need to break every existing program, just deprecate and discourage the old Python Unicode type. The new Unicode type (Python 3's string) is a complicated mess, and anyone who thinks it is simple and clean isn't aware of what's going on under the hood.
Having your strings be a simple array of bytes, which might be UTF-8 or WTF-8, seems to be working out pretty well for Go.