&gt; And everyone is still skeptical about it,<p>They are not skeptical. Nobody thinks &quot;yeah if I just wait long enough, Python 3 will go away and 2.8 will come out&quot;.<p>They just don&#x27;t see an incentive to update. Simple as that. It is basic economics of time and money.<p>Python 2 wasn&#x27;t terrible and Python 3 isn&#x27;t dramatically better. Unicode and other stuff in Python 3 is nice. Is it nice enough to start digging into stable, working, money making code just to say &quot;Yay, Python 3&quot;?  I think the development community has spoken by how it was handled. It&#x27;s gonna happen but it will happen at a very slow pace.<p>Imagine this alternative scenario -- &quot;Python 3 brings 3x speed improvement + removed GIL&quot;. Ok, I bet you, there would have been a much faster adoption because now there is a greater incentive to justify it.  People would think &quot;Yeah, I&#x27;ll destabilize my code a bit but I gain performance, I can do that&quot;.<p>Someone in a sibling comment suggested &quot;They should have just stopped updating security patches for 2.7, that would have forced them to use 3.0&quot;. That&#x27;s ok if Python holds a monopoly on development languages. But it doesn&#x27;t. As soon as that happens developers will not just look at updating to Python 3, they&#x27;ll start looking at other ecosystems: Go, Elixir, Java, Clojure, Scala, NodeJS etc.