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Python 3.2 Released
digitalderbs writes "Python 3.2 was released on Feb 20th 2011 with many new improvements. New features include many useful updates to the unittest module, a stable ABI for extensions, pyc repository directories, improvements to the email and ssl modules and many others. This also marks the first release in the 3000-series that is no longer backported to the 2.0-series."
Come on, guys. How does this help us keep up to date on political events, popular music, or funny videos?
That's exactly what Python did and does, where appropriate. Where it isn't, such as the changed meaning of string literals (they are all unicode now) or the division operator, the breakage is hard. There is no way around that if you want to modernize the language. C# did it too, Java did not. Which is why generics in Java are half-assed and why there are a lot of quirks in the language that traces their roots back to version 1.1 or earlier.
Football Odds
Counterargument A: The stupid design decisions and approaches that are now obsolete and make no sense should be forced out of code. Otherwise, the Bad and Wrong version persists a lot longer than it should: some mediocre developer will Google how to solve a Python problem, get something that explains the Bad and Wrong version, puts it into their code, may get a bunch of deprecation warnings, but figures "hey it works, good enough". And if you need an example of how badly out of hand that can get, look at PHP, which still has to support really really stupid things from PHP2 or so because of backwards-compatability, and thus leaving behind a legacy of horrific PHP code.
Counterargument B: Ensuring backwards-compatibility always forever and ever ensures that the language complexity can only grow, never shrink. And thus you grow and grow and grow until eventually the language cannot even be completely defined using BNF or anything similar. Case in point: C++.
I am officially gone from