I'm with you there. A programming language is my tool, not my destination. I shouldn't have to keep learning how to hold my hammer every six months nor have to go back to every house I ever built to replace the nails every year.

There is value to being able to say "I'm done" and walking away knowing my code will happily chug along for the next 20 years.

Ha... I had asked a question in Quora several years back on exactly the same topic (deleted account, don't have link).

I don't understand why programming languages need to be released like other "software". I see it a lot for modern languages like Rust.

To me, a programming language should have a major revision only once in 5-10 years. All other changes should be performance improvements or implementation changes which do not affect the end user which in this case is the programmer.

I would like to know the details, seriously. Thousands of broken packages because of major python release?

As a former package maintainer I can assure you that every update of gcc breaks the build of some other package. And we are talking about C or c++, languages existing longer than Python and having much stronger backward compatibility story. And no one ever said that upgrade to recent gcc is a problem.

Iow there is hardly any up to date system which do not require constant maintenance.

You should just let developers use virtualenv and then let them install packages through pip, or let them use tool like poetry which makes the experience even better. This makes life easier for both sides.

If you use RedHat or CentOS I would highly recommend ius.us repo, it contains latest versions of python and it's pretty much all what's needed.

What packages? Sounds like a process ripe for optimization.