Like I said, my day job isn't being a dev which means time for that is rare.

Languages are not user software, they should never be deprecated. I get deprecating standard libraries bur under no context is it ok to deprecate a whole language. Yoh can freeze development and only perform security updates to the interpreter but there is no need to deprecate a language. It is a betrayal of the trusr users put into python when they invested time on it and this is exactly what I mean by avoiding rapidly changing languages. They don't care one bit that people are using their language, they treat like any other software that gets supported and discarded. C89 is still supported! People write new stuff with it. You know why? Because there is nothing to support, just parsing and compiling of a langauge. No new features need to be developed and bugs should be accepted instead of fixed. The interpreter should be available for download and use on any platform for as long as even one guy is using the language.

> you're probably on a very old distro.

Maybe, I usually go for debian but I have run into this issue and it becomes a dependency nightmare on anything that needs the old python version (in the package manager dependency resolver not in python).

> If new versions came out every 3-4 years, that would mean they would have more drastic changes

That's fine, because there would be less versions. All changes are drastic changes from the perspective of someone that is having to google random python errors to figure out what broke and how to fix it. At least it won't be a constant nightmare fixing problems made by the langauge itself in addition to the 3rd party code and your own code. The frequency of how many bugs you have causes by those 3 cause categories should in that increasing frequency. I should not have lnaguage version bugs more often than bugs in my own code.

> But in the end, it doesn't really matter how often a new version comes out but rather how long the old versions should be supported, right? And I think it's up to the library authors to decide how long to support older versions

It does matter because most devs that code for a living like to tinker with new flashy versions so each version of a library they release is that much more prone to requiring newer python versions. The less frequent python releases, the more they will use the current python features before introducing version breaks.

I really think it is a developer culture problem at the end of the day where because you are writing foss code, you don't care about the experience of those who depend on your code.