Probably most of the people who like writing language interpreters understood that Python 3 fixed a lot of mistakes, so it would be funner to work on.

Though I'm surprised nobody really wrote a transitional fork (six gets you a lot of the way but "Python 2.8 which has _just_ the str/bytes change" would have been useful).

Ultimately Python 2 isn't a better language, it's just the language everyone's code was in...

In my fantasy-py language, there is no "str", base types would be explicit. unicode() bytes(). "something" could have an implicit u"". Composite types could be explicit. If I want a set of int's, I can use mypy now to s1: t.Set[int] = set(), but that's just linting.

> What's stopping people from forking the language at python 2.7?

If you don't want to change/add something to the language, then why fork it?. You can just continue using it as it is!

I truly wish this would become a thing. It's really frustrating having to update my installed packages and my code for some stupid change the language designers thought is sooo worth it. Just stabilize the bloody thing so I can do some work. Updating code so it meshes with the "latest and greatest" is _not real work_.