I believe that these experiences actually strengthen my arguments:
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Perl 6: Was in announcement state forever. Scala 3 will go into feature freeze this summer, will have developer previews this year and the final release will be out next year.
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Python 2/3: Suffered exactly the “all pain and no gain problem” I was writing about. People did not get why they should suffer the pain of migration for Unicode strings. Now that Python 3 has more interesting features, Python 2 is going away. Besides, I am confident we can avoid Python’s migration problems through a combination of static typing and binary compatibility.