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Python 3 faced a lot of friction when it was introduced.

There was no backwards compatibility with Python 2 and it had relatively little adoption.

They added Python 3 features to Python 2 over the years to encourage adoption of Python 3 as the standard. It worked.

Now we just need Apple to ship Mac OS with Python 3 instead of 2 as the default and that'll push adoption for developers.

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> They added Python 3 features to Python 2 over the years to encourage adoption of Python 3 as the standard. It worked.

Did it really? My impression was the opposite: the fact that so much of Python 3 became available in Python 2 made people feel like there was no point in moving to Python 3.

It worked both ways. Some new features were ported back, some could be ported, but explicitly weren't to encourage migration. On the other side, things like the "u" prefix got re-added to python 3 for compatibility.

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