I don’t understand what they mean with the Java comments. Moving from 5 to 6 was a massive pain at one of my companies. It was a two year transition that went into the EOL of 5. 6 to 7 was just barely any better. Maybe they wrote forward-compatible Java and never had that ugly experience. Given that python 3 has been on the radar for 10 years, they could have done the same for python.

Python has one backwards-incompatible change in 10 years, and I wouldn’t even call it a major one at the time. In these 10 years nobody who’s on these long-term projects and complaining on Twitter seems to have much as started testing on 3, let alone budgeted time or resources for a migration. Someone like Red Hat keeps coming to the rescue when the complaints get loud and extends the date by a few years — and rather than taking that as a clue that time is limited and to start working on a gentle, n-year upgrade plan, these groups just go back to acting like they have an infinite timeline. Until it happens all over again.

The good thing about linux’s backwards compatibility that they mention means that the python2 interpreter will probably be compilable long after its EOL.