There’s no doubt that the 2 -> 3 transition was rough for the Python community. I personally stopped using Python as my go-to language in the early Python 3, since writing Python 2 code felt stupid since it was outdated the moment you wrote it, and 3 wasn’t really well supported by the community and tooling yet.

On the other hand, Python adoption has really taken off since Python 3.5-ish. Python has never been more popular.

So while you may wonder what might have been, had the transition been smoother, it’s hard to argue that Python 3 is a failure. All’s well that ends well, I guess?

Although it’s sad that Guido felt the need to step down. It’ll be interesting to see where Python goes this decade, now the transition is over and there’s a wealth of possibilities in front of it.

I expect there’ll be a lot of people looking to replace JavaScript with Python once you can run it in the browser with WASM.