Yeah, they pretty much botched the 2-&gt;3 transition. I would love to see a 4 that included a viable 2-&gt;4 transition with semantic versioning until then. But Guido&amp;Co are going to do whatever the hell they feel like doing, community be damned. Py2.7 will be forked and going strong long after 2020. Actually 2020 will probably be a Python renaissance when the cruft, incompatibilities, gil, no jit, etc can finally be addressed without the Guido mafia. 2.8 will be what 3 should have been, using deprecation for dated syntax and gradual introduction of new features. Python is open source. There will be a 2.8 regardless of whether Guido is involved.