What can be learned from that Python desaster to avoid such a catastrophy with some other programming language?
I really would like to read some analysis about what went wrong.
Thank you very much for your attention!
I think that if the teams had somehow managed to coordinate a more or less simultaneous release then much of that early momentum wouldn't have been lost.
Here's how Aaron Swartz (and probably others as well) thinks the transition to Python 3 should have happened: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/python3
On a big python project at work we only very recently have lost our last dependency on a Python2 library and it took some dedicated effort to track and replace these dependencies. And upgrading all of our own code to be Python3 compatible will be a whole other can of worms (even though we were careful to write our code in a forwards-compatible way using future imports etc.).
End applications did not want to upgrade because no third party libs were available.
Third party libs did not want to upgrade because no applications would use them anyway.
The correct way to handle such a transition is a proper bridge to import old libraries, then applications dare to upgrade without missing out on libraries which later leads to a bigger demand on third party libraries.
Another big reason is simply plain old stupid FUD.