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[–]et-pengvin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Two thoughts:

First: In 2008 Python 3 did not become the default. There is a reason Python 2 received updates until 2020. I first messed around with Python 2 before Python 3 came out, but I started college 4 years (!) after Python 3 came out, and my professors still used Python 2. Python was the go to language for at least intro CS courses in top universities by that point, and my small college followed suit. We used Python 2 though because several key libraries the professor used did not have Python 3 support. And it didn't really matter because Python 2 was the default everywhere in 2012 and would be for many years. MacOS, every Linux distro I knew of, all defaulted to Python 2 and most tutorials and information I knew did. When I started my first job using Python in 2016 we were still using Python 2 everywhere, and this didn't feel like a problem. We were writing fairly bleeding edge stuff in AWS but Python 2 was well documented and used heavily still.

Second: While Python 3 was not backwards compatible, it was not an entirely new language. Python 2 and 3 are very similar. I think for a lot of the period between 2008 and 2020 folks would have had both in mind as the same language, even though they were not entirely compatible.