[EliAndrewC]

I was on the "Python 3000" mailing list while it was being planned, and the prevailing attitude seemed to be "it'll probably take 5 years before the community moves to Python 3". (That's paraphrased and not a direct quote, though I saw people say that sort of thing almost word for word a few times.)

This was optimistic, but at least we see that the community is indeed gradually moving to Python 3, even if it's taking a few more years.

[brettcannon]

Technically the goal was a majority of new projects started using Python 3 in 5 years. Regardless, everyone knew it would take several years to reach a point like this.

[philipov]

I switched from Perl to Python at version 3.4, and while it might be popular for people already invested in Python 2 to downplay the syntactic improvements, they were a big deal in convincing me to switch to Python as my go-to infrastructure language.

[mangeletti]

Exactly, and I, for one, was using Python 3 for a new app, in production, in 2013, precisely 5 years after the release.

[ceronman]

This is true, but currently, most of developers of Python acknowledge some mistakes in the Python 3 transition. Specifically the fact that such an abrupt compatibility break was underestimated. And that's why Python 4 won't break compatibility with Python 3.

In any case, I'm very happy to see the Python 3 transition moving forward. And let's hope this does not happen again.