Python 3.0 was released in 2008, the fact that 14 years later 2.7 is still widely available (and often the default python, e.g. in my openSUSE Tumbleweed system here) means that the "buzz" was more than warranted.
Also of course things would migrate, it isn't like there was any choice on that matter (and projects like Tauthon that tried to provide a choice had several "Pythonistas" attacking it).
There was another choice. This is what I mean: however bad you think py2->py3 was, people are using py3 now unless they've got really good reasons not to and are prepared to suffer. When it came to perl5/6, it turns out over time most people choose "neither".
SUSE didn't update the link like others did so it's not really that py2 is the default, but python2 was always named python. It's going away anyway: https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/15-SP3/in...
As someone who is still supporting multiple desktop GUI applications in python, what did they pick instead? I'd love move off Python, but nothing else seemed to have the proper maturity.
it wasn't inevitable, but it was damn likely.
This new trend is about a decade old by now. Pandas was released in 2011, numpy in 1995. Google released Tensorflow to the public in 2015.
Only if you count "not making a choice" (ie. staying with Python 2) as a choice. But this isn't really practical since everything else is pushed towards Python 3.
Well, the hang-up in the roll out of "Perl 6" (now, Raku) gave people ammunition to shout about how "Perl is dead", but the central trouble was a lot of people wanted to spread that word. Myself, I think the success of a weirdo outsider language was making some insiders very upset, and they were fighting back any way they could.
Supporting older, variant behavior isn't really causing problems for the devs, from what I hear, when it does they go after it with the deprecation cycle.