My semi-regular reminder that Python 3 is on schedule

I really appreciate the approach of the Python dev team. It's methodical, deliberate and patient; the exact opposite of how I feel the PHP team has managed that project. Features in PHP seem to be decided upon and implemented in a rather hasty and whimsical manner. A couple of examples come to mind:

- PHP access syntax is completely inconsistent. Accessing a method/member of an instance is $foo->bar; a static method/member of a class is accessed as Foo::bar; and namespace access introduces yet another syntax, Foo\bar\baz.

- Another example is the introduction of anonymous, first-class functions. For five major versions, functions were not first-class, and existing libraries and frameworks were written to accept function names in-place of the actual functions. One point-release changed all that, and the result has been a predictable clusterfsck of inconsistency. I wish the PHP team had planned for a long-term adoption of this feature: first-class functions are a fundamental part of a language's character, not a whimsical bolt-on.

Yes "python 3 has failed to gain lots of users" is different from "python 3 has failed to gain lots of users, but planned to at this stage".

I'm not really a Python programmer, but all this perplexes me.

Python 3 seems not that Earth shatteringly different, when compared to the previous versions.

What are the plans for new and ambitious things happening? (In Python 4?) Edit: Preferably in a backwards compatible way.

Edit: No big plans in threading, functional programming, etc? No OO extensions? Etc...