>> Choosing Python 2 as a sexy new language for a brand new project in 2023 certainly surprised me.
> Yep!

I admit I checked the date: was it really April 12 ... or April 1? :) ... OTOH, I shouldn't have been surprised, given what I predicted back in 2011 :)

Python 3: I only claimed it was meeting "substantial resistance". Maybe that's unfair, depending on your interpretation of "substantial", but it's certainly meeting some resistance based on random web chatter on the subject. Well, I'm a Python user and I'm resisting it. ;-) My personal opinion is that breaking backward compatibility was unwarranted for a release with relatively modest improvements. Many businesses with large investments in Python 2.x code will resist Python 3 indefinitely because upgrading will prove too risky and/or too expensive.

... where is the ROI on spending millions of dollars rewriting millions of lines of already working code, without adding any customer value, while being almost guaranteed to suffer numerous breakages to critical business systems? ... you also pay an Opportunity cost ...

See also: Re^6: Improving p5p: Perl is going to stay Perl (Backwards Compatibility)

Perversely, despite cruelly abandoning its many happy and loyal Python 2 users (by breaking Backward compatibility), Python won the language adoption war! At least, it's been leading the TIOBE index for quite a while now (from Perl holds its own against Python Ruby et al, note that Perl (No. 6) was one ahead of Python (No. 7) in the TIOBE Index back in 2008).

The Why Perl Didn't Win essay argues that this is because an ecosystem focused on maintaining existing projects, rather than creating new projects, will be less attractive for new projects :) ... and being adopted for new projects is how you win the language war in the long run.

This topic is analysed in more detail at: Organizational Culture (Part VI): Sociology

I'm not very proficient with Python, but AFAIR it seems to be quite normal to have multiple Python versions installed.

Somehow these incompatible modules seem to be able to communicate.

Update

In a pythonista way of understanding communicate

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}