I don't understand why Python 3 is a flop. It's a incompatible, new version of a programming language. It's seen slow, steady, constant adoption. In the low single digits, but that's to be expected for a incompatible new version.
Most Linux distributions will be adopting it, most mainstream packages are ported or are planning a port.
Want to bet that in 3 years' time Python 3 will be the most popular Python version (51%-49% maybe, but still a majority)?
Wait for all the LTS/Enterprise distributions to switch to it - that will be the tipping point.
And then people bitch and moan about Java's type erasure since the type when Java added generics. You can't have everything. Python 3 is not backwards compatible. Its adoption was bound to not be 90% in 1 year or so, especially for an already widely used and embedded system.
Python 3 is not a success, but it is a quite nice base for building the next 10 years of Python. And for this goal, Python 3 is probably on track.
The real answer is both PG and Google and many other Serious Folk have blogged and talked about how growth is the single most important key metric for tracking project success.
Actual total users are irrelevant; they're like page views. Cute, but useless.
What's critical is that once a product has over come its initial growth spurt of early adopters, if the rate of rate of growth isn't in the right ballpark, the project is in trouble.
My fears for python 3 are two fold:
1) The initial 'early adopters' growth spurt of python 3 is over. However, we're not seeing any large scale migrations to py3; lots and lots of people just sticking with py2. Sure, new stuff is being written in python 3, but the question is, is it growing? How fast is it growing compared to the overall growth rate of python adoption?
2) NO ONE KNOWS. The core python team is not tracking this information; either they don't care, or they're totally out of touch with reality.
So when I say 'no one is using it' I mean, 'relatively few new people are using it, the growth rate over time of python3 relative to python2 appears to be flat', and if you were part of YC, that would mean the project catastrophically failing.
...and the developers should be paying attention, and they don't appear to be.
My definition of success for shadowcat doesn't require that level of growth. I'm sure many, many companies have a definition of success that doesn't require a 'rate of rate of growth' congruent with being 'part of YC'.
Given that, attempting to apply the same definition of success to a programming language just seems silly, especially given explosive growth usually ends up with a disastrous pop culture - think 1999-era Perl or 2003-era PHP or 2006-era Rails for examples where the majority of people using the language weren't necessarily adding noticeable value to the ecosystem, and in the long term have created a lot of hatred for the respective platforms as a result of code that was just plain bad.
I'm just saying that if the rate of adoption of python 3 is flat or negative, that's extremely bad regardless of the absolute number of people using it.
Its naive to think that growth isn't a key metric for any community project.
I'm not going to justify that; there's plenty of research out there about it.
Most Linux distributions will be adopting it, most mainstream packages are ported or are planning a port.
Want to bet that in 3 years' time Python 3 will be the most popular Python version (51%-49% maybe, but still a majority)?
Wait for all the LTS/Enterprise distributions to switch to it - that will be the tipping point.