The change to string handling justifies it for me. Writing `u’foo’` everywhere is a pain, and the rest of the 2.7 model is extraordinarily prone to runtime errors. With 3.6, I don’t have those problems.
I've noticed that the "Who cares about Python 3" types are not the people working on the kinds of problems I am. So my conclussion is that for many kinds of problems the benefits of Python 2 are kind of meh, so people stay in their comfort zone. For some kinds of problems, Python 3 is a huge, huge win over Python 2. Whether or not someone is a Python 3 advocate says more about the kinds of problems they work on than anything else.
Just because we learned to work around unicode issues doesn't mean they're not completely bonkers in 2.7
Many third party modules tended to explode spectacularly with encode/decode errors, when they were fed non-ascii strings, when used by people who write using all these funny characters.
Just the correct handling of strings in Python 3 alone is a hell of a reason to switch to it.
I mostly deal with network protocols, lots of numeric content, and scarcely any non-English text.
But I appreciate other people have different needs.
> For the sorts of work I do, having to distinguish between lists and dictionaries makes using Python 3 more difficult and more prone to errors. I mostly deal with lists, and scaresely any dictionaries.
Just use bytes where appropriate.