Comment by sjellis

I get the impression that backwards-compatibility does weigh pretty heavily on the Python core developers these days. There are so many Python installations out there doing so much that the default answer to a change has to be "no". The fact that macOS and popular Linux distributions ship with copies of Python is great, but once something is effectively a component of operating systems, boldness is not a viable strategy. Arguably, one of the reasons why the transition to Python 3 has been so drawn out is that every time somebody installs macOS or one of many Linux distributions, a new Python 2 system is born. I've seen .NET Core developers explain that having .NET Framework shipped in Windows put them under massive constraints, and this was one of the motivations for a new runtime.