Guido just created a bigger problem. No good deed goes unpunished.
This shows a serious disconnect from reality. Discontinued support for Python 2 was never a major reason to move to python 3 for apps. Library support is WAY more important in the choice to switch. If all of the libraries worked with Python 3, there would be no reason for app writers not to switch.
If only there was a way to deprecate a language, with the same meaning as deprecating an API method: "it's not gone yet, but it will be soon, so in strict mode using it is an error." (The main problem to solve would be: strict mode of what? The package manager?)
One way that usually works is to release a newer version and stop updating the old one after five years. Oh wait...
In fact there'd be "tens of thousands" websites made with Python alone (Django et al), so the number of apps in total will be much higher.
Heck, people doing scientific Python are more than 10.000, and they write more than one new apps for their research every year.
I just dislike how melling basically pulled a number out of his ass, and then used it as "evidence" to back up his claims. I wouldn't even consider it a low-quality estimate, since he doesn't even try to justify or explain how that number was obtained.
In this case, "tens of thousands" could very well really be "hundreds of thousands". It could be significantly less, too. Regardless, it's purely speculative. Using such made up numbers makes his argument weaker than perhaps not using any such value at all.