Few reasons and there&#x27;s more but I won&#x27;t go on forever.<p>1)The &quot;latest version&quot; of a programming language is not the same as having the latest version of Firefox. Having the latest version can actually be a detriment if you lose libraries as with Python3.<p>2)It may be unpopular, but I tend to follow the market to a certain degree. Python is my language of choice for home projects and employment. But almost all employers use Python2.x. So I follow them just to keep 1 less hassle out of my life.<p>3)Losing the long tail of libraries that 2.x has. Many things support Python3, and I&#x27;m not against it. I&#x27;m just waiting for the day when Python3 is more convenient than Python2 to move. I wasn&#x27;t one asking for the Py3 changes, and they certainly weren&#x27;t done for me. So I don&#x27;t feel like being inconvenienced or doing any porting&#x2F;heavy lifting in the meantime.<p>4)My petty reason. I think everyone should just do what&#x27;s in their best interests.
I advertised that &quot;2 of course&quot; because it is a given, but rarely stated. I&#x27;ve met a number of pushy Python3 folks and find them distasteful, which hasn&#x27;t helped budge me in the slightest. They&#x27;ve probably made me a little edgy on that topic.<p>5)It&#x27;s a programming language, so what helps you build something the fastest should be what we use. Today that&#x27;s still Python2. Some people feel very passionately about Python3 and I hope they spend many hours porting and building the ecosystem for my arrival one day. What seems to be going on instead is they&#x27;re hoping to convert more devotees that will go out there and do a bunch of free ports.<p>6)I&#x27;m more concerned with moving too early than I am too late when the Python3 ecosystem one day, maybe, eclipses Python2. They&#x27;re just not that different, I&#x27;ve used both and it&#x27;s no different from building software with 2. But they have vastly different breadth of libraries in 2&#x27;s favor. They also screwed up on a few things with 3, it isn&#x27;t really a flat &quot;upgrade&quot; either.<p>7)Python3 is just adding more bloat. I generally prefer features are REMOVED from a language until there&#x27;s nothing left that could reasonably be removed from the core language.  Ideally I&#x27;d like to see a small version of Python with the basics never touched and features added through addons or a macro system.<p>Latest version, upgrade, and support-ends-2020 are all political statements in regards to Python3 that mean nothing in reality.
Latest version- what can&#x27;t be backported?
Upgrade- more like sidegrade once all things are considered.
Support EOL- total smoke and mirrors, code will not stop running post 2020.<p>They&#x27;re tossing every feature against the wall that they can to fix that. I&#x27;m one that holds feature-soup in disdain though so this is unattractive to me, and I prefer a well thought out &quot;one way to do it&quot; (Zen of Python) approach. Python is well beyond the basics at this point and not a small language, but at least 2.7 is frozen and I can choose to use the backports people provide if I want. I like a smaller core language if possible because I have to read other people&#x27;s codebases.