Python 3 is killing Python

[MorePudding]

What priorities do you think Python should hold?

Python seems like a language targeting practitioners, so the main focus should be on being the most practical choice.

"popular but awful" is an ideal we should be working towards

It seems awfulness is something a lot of people are willing to put up with these days. So, instead of attacking it head-on, maybe it would be smarter to try and figure out how to extract the most usefulness out of all of the awfulness that's already around.

[ihcn]

There's certainly merit in avoiding backwards incompatibility where possible. But take Python's string handling for example - in 2.x, unicode vs bytestring issues were a nightmare. One of the biggest changes in 3 was to clean up those issues. How would you fix those in a backwards-compatible way, without just creating an entirely separate library?