&gt; <i>We have decided as a team that a change as big as unicode&#x2F;str&#x2F;bytes will never happen so abruptly again. When we started Python 3 we thought&#x2F;hoped that the community would do what Python did and do one last feature release supporting Python 2 and then cut over to Python 3 development for feature development while doing bugfix releases only for the Python 2 version.</i><p>I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s not a coincidence that string encoding was also behind the Great Sadness of Moving From Ruby 1.8 to 1.9. How have other mainstream languages made this jump, if it was needed, and were they able to do it in a non-breaking way?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1162122" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=1162122</a>