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Me three! It happens all too often that an example Python script fails in one, then succeeds in the other. I'm also a casual Python user, trying to ramp up because of its obvious popularity and utility. I wish that the basic syntactical changes could have been designed to be more backward-compatible. But, eventually I suppose, python2 will just be a footnote in history.

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I'm afraid it will forever remembered as a cautionary tale of a bad transition.

Same situation here. Trying to jump on this bandwagon and finding it's a slithering target.

I just wish they'd named it something different. If there's neither forward nor backward compatibility, I'd argue they're not the same language and should not have the same name.

Most languages have had breaking changes at some point in their history. Even the language known as "Perl 5" had them in almost every version.

In the real world, I've found Perl scripts written in 1999 (and poorly - as they were written by me in my teens) will still run in 2019. It's basically the policy that even language mistakes won't be undone:

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpolicy.html#BACKWARD-COMPATIBIL...

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