postfuturist

Java 6 did not break backward compatibility (code written for Java 5 generally runs fine on Java 6).

"One of the great strengths of Python 2 is the long tail of 3rd party libraries" does not imply it is the "only measure"

Did you read the article? The long tail is the critical collection of libraries and most of them will never be ported. People write new Python 2 libraries every day, actually--the list is getting longer, not shorter. That said, gevent is an extremely critical library for a lot of production Python 2 code. There doesn't even seem to be a roadmap to port it to Python 3.

Python 2 has unicode literals and utf-8 available if you declare them at the top of your file. You don't need Python 3 for that.

I'm the author. I've never worked at Microsoft (where did you get that?). I'm a Linux guy.

The "lazy people" you refer to is 98% of the Python community.

Python 3 didn't "gain" static type checking. You can (and I do) run pylint against Python 2 code which is just static analysis, not full type checking. The situation here has not changed between Python 2 and 3.

Python is glue code. You write a small piece of Python to tie together external libraries. Moving a smallish piece of Python code from Python 2 to Python 3 often means porting several 3rd party libraries. If you were to move to Ruby, all you'd need to rewrite is your own code, as there are likely already 3rd party libraries which need no porting.

> No one expects an app written for OSX 10.4 Tiger to work on OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.

That's truly sad.

json.org/license

That's just a license for software available on json.org, so no impact at all.

OK, I'm moving to Finland.

I like Prolog

Also, I have a love/hate relationship with a lot of these langs, so votes go in both categories, I suppose.

It's a common technique to serialize arbitrary data into blob fields in SQL databases--I've seen it for years. Usually, it is considered an anti-pattern. Postgres 9.1 doesn't do much other than verify the JSON data is valid JSON and then stores it unchanged, though successive versions are adding more first-class JSON support.