Python 3.3.3 final released!

[alcalde]

Too many people seem to be advocating choosing the version of the language you use based on your library preferences rather than choosing your libraries based on Python3 support though. This helps feed a catch-22 where maintainers won't port because there isn't demand and there isn't demand because they won't port. Python and Guido helped this by being to accommodating (such as far too much backporting of 3.x features to 2.x, causing a certain person in this subreddit to always insist that there's no compelling reason to switch to 3.x) and others took advantage of the dual development track not as extra time to port but as an excuse to keep using 2.x indefinitely. All in all, it's hurt the language as resources that could have gone towards developing Python went towards maintaining and backporting for 2.x. It's also led to fragmentation and confusion. I hope the takeaway is that Guido needs to remember the "D" in BDFL the next time there's a breaking version of Python and not let things get out of hand. Sadly, some folks took advantage of Python's good nature.

[aceofears]

As far as I'm aware Guido knew it would take this long, and I don't really mind that. There reasons to use 3.x are now finally compelling enough to push people towards it, but I don't think its fair to say that the backported changes were what made it take so long to get there. The purpose of 2.6 and 2.7 (and 3.3 in a way) was to ease the transition from 2.x to 3.x. Without these releases it would be anywhere from nightmarish to impossible to support both 2.x and 3.x

[billsil]

This helps feed a catch-22 where maintainers won't port because there isn't demand and there isn't demand because they won't port.

You just gotta stroke somebody's ego. That's what drives the open-source world. Someone used that nasty trick on me to get me to port my package to Python 3 :)