I dread the day Python will be as bloated as C++ or Java, neither that dare to remove things.
Also the python 2 string type was more in line with how other unix utilities work, so while I do think the 3 string type is generally better for the web, it wasn't an obvious improvement for the other large usage of python. While it's a very versatile language, I would say the major niches of python are: web dev, shell scripting, and scientific computing. The changes in python 3 were (somewhat) helpful for web dev, but really were inconsequential and/or actively harmful for the other uses.
Mixed with how condescending the python dev team acted about it, and how it really wasn't until about python 3.6 that there was any compelling reason to move to python 3,you can see where most of the hate comes from.
And by the way, even if Python is very popular today, I do think that rift really hurt the language. I worked at least at one company where Python was considered for a project, but eventually shelved because of management's confusion over the 2/3 issue.
> The "print" statement being a great example. Was it kind of weird? Sure.
I am reminded of the Emerson quip "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds". The Py2 print statement is special/weird because it is a very important and special behavior, especially for newcomers. It's not randomly special, it's special because it models something that deserves special treatment.
Py3 is more consistent, but less humane. I use it over Py2 only because the market has moved on, but every time I type print with parentheses I curse Guido.
Can you expand on this, why is this more humane? And why should print be a special function?
print "hello world"
vs
print ("hello world")
Larry Wall of Perl thought about these things in terms of Huffman Coding, i.e. the most common thing you might want to write should have the syntax elide any easily understood context.
In the case of "print", we know we're not talking about any random function here: it's the function for getting output to the terminal, one of the most fundamental operations in all of programming. So I think it's totally fine for it to have a special representation in the language.
One nit I would call-out is that most people don't put a space between the print and the ("hello world"), so idiomatically when learning, print is 'just another function'. And since HelloWorld is usually the first thing people learn, I wouldn't want them to think print is different than any other function.
Also, the first line of The Zen of Python is "Beautiful is better than ugly", I can understand why consistency was a priority here.
We could get into a whole other discussion about whether or not a programming language should have and adhere to a "culture", but fundamentally I agree with the arguments against Python making this change. It's just not worth the effort, and like others have said, they might've lost of a lot of momentum to JS.
That the transition took nearly a decade (and for some still goes at this point) and several minor-versions is another hint at strong problems in planing. At the end we got something better, but the road toward it was just far to painful for what we got. And this fuels hate till today.
Joking mostly aside, python is way way closer to C++ in terms of language feature bloat; where Java is notoriously spartan and slow moving (moreso historically).
Ofcourse I know you're also reffering to standard lib gunk but that's relatively less impactful.
The big issue with the python 3 shift was when you touch something as substantial, subtle, and pervasive as strings you're going to cause problems. I wont speak to if it was worth it.
Arguably worth it. Dividing 1 by 2 with "1 / 2" and getting 0 is a real 'wat' for novice programmers. And the workaround is a 'wat' for experts: instead of using a floating point division operator, cast one of your parameters to float.