My way of remembering str -&gt; decode; (s-&gt;d); sad.  sad that I have to remember this and that it is still the &quot;future of the language&quot; despite significant and ongoing resistance.<p>EDIT: This last line of the article pretty much sums it up: &quot;We structured the transition thinking the community would come along with us in leaving Python 2 behind, but that turned out not to be the case and instead we have taken some more time and are using a Python 2&#x2F;3 compatible subset of the language to manage the transition.&quot;<p>I wonder if python 3.6 or 3.7 will acquiesce to this and give an option for something like &quot;from __past__ import str&quot; like we have for __future__ in 2.7 to make these backward incompatibilities easier to deal with.