I'm quite disappointed with the pace of development of the Python language. Five years of support for a particular version seems far too short.

I mostly use Python in scientific contexts, and hitting end-of-life after five years means that for a lot project, code needs to transition language versions in the middle of a project. Not to mention the damage to reproducibility. Once something is marked "end of life" it means that future OS versions are going to have a really good reason to say "this code shouldn't even be able to run on our new OS."

Template strings seem OK, but I would give up all new language features in a heartbeat to get a bit of long term support.

You can pay for long term support from private companies.

And your scientific context is a distinct minority for python now. Most new development for python is for data/AI. Considering LLMs get updated every quarter, and depreciated every year, there is no appetite for code that doesn't get updated for 5 years.

> hitting end-of-life after five years means that for a lot project, code needs to transition language versions in the middle of a project.

Your Python interpreter will not spontaneously combust due to being end-of-life. It just eventually won't be able to run new versions of tools; but your existing tool versions should also work fine for a very long time. All you're missing out on is bugfixes, which third parties (such as a Linux distro) are often willing to provide.

When a language like Python doesn't innovate at this rate, eventually people will get annoyed about how primitive it ends up feeling compared to languages that have been around for less than half as long. The devs' time and resources are limited and they've clearly advertised their time preference and committed to a reliable schedule - this is an explicit attempt to accommodate users like you better, compared to the historical attitude of releasing the next minor version "when it's done". It also means that they're locked in to supporting five versions at a time while developing a sixth. There's only so much that can reasonably be expected here.

Seriously, what you're getting here is well above the curve for open-source development.

You can use uv to pin, download, and use a specific version of a Python interpreter on a per project basis. You shouldn't use your OS provided Python interpreter for long running projects for all the reasons you mentioned, including reproducibility. If you insist on using the vendor provided interpreter, then use RHEL (or a free clone) or any other long suppported Linux distro (there are many). Five years is a very long time in technology. It is not reasonable to expect more from core maintainers IMO. Especially considering we have better options.