I remember quite distinctly when the Python 3000 manifesto was released just under ten years ago, in April of 2006. That is when the line in the sand was drawn and the key mistakes were made that caused the &quot;schism&quot; in the community. What the Python community was screaming for was a fix for the GIL and the other performance issues in Python, not minor changes to Unicode handling that were maybe awkward but perfectly possible to get right in Python 2.6.<p>Google seriously spent tons of effort at the time trying to remove that GIL. They were one of the biggest proponents of Python at the time, and frankly they were part of what made it so successful. With their work on Unladen Swallow not making meaningful progress and the Python core developers concentrating on Python 3000, making it clear that they don&#x27;t even care, it isn&#x27;t a wonder that Google was hedging their bets by hiring Rob Pike to work on Go, which many now see as most directly being a competitor to Python, and which has sapped a lot of people who would potentially be Python users.<p>Meanwhile, the broken release of 3.0 needs to be blamed for part of the problem, not used as a reason to delay the historical date of fracture: a lot of things were broken in 3.0, including some basic things that Python got wrong in Unicode. The performance regressions were not quickly fixed, making people hesitant of the benefits of Python 3, and the Unicode issues (which were not fixed until years later, when they added the round-trip-safe Unicode conversions; but even this is a workaround, as filenames are defined to be strings of bytes by the filesystem) were ironic as the whole point of Python 3 was to somehow be better at dealing with Unicode :&#x2F;.<p>And you seem to be forgetting that the real problem was not the features added in 3.0 but the features <i>taken away at the same time</i> that made it impossible to write reasonable code that ran on both 2.7 and 3.0 even for extremely simple cases like &quot;catches an exception&quot;. They only just a year or so ago have started to crack their party line of &quot;shut up and upgrade to 3: it is better and you are wrong&quot; and add some backwards compatibility features to 3.x, such as supporting the u prefix (which was the absolute dumbest thing they could have removed).