Let’s Talk About Python 3.0
Although at the start I paid only the most cursory attention to the Python 3.0 development process, every time I looked into it in any detail I was struck by the amount of time and thought which went into the changes which have been made to the language. There are, so far as I can tell, no frivolous “we just did this because we liked it” differences between Python 2.x and Python 3.x; every breaking change seems to have been discussed to death, justified based on real-world problems and even then carefully considered and reconsidered just to see if a backwards-compatible way could prevail. Python 3.0 came out of a years-long process of development by people who were simultaneously actually using Python and taking notes on how it could be better, and it shows.
