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There are very, very few breaking changes within Python 3. If you're an individual user, then upgrading to the latest version is almost certainly a good idea.

But there are lots of companies that release software using Python. To ensure a stable production environment, they upgrade more slowly, or on a schedule that's distinct from the Python release cycle.

Also, companies often don't just let people upgrade things themselves. The IT department schedules a company-wide Python upgrade, for example, testing the effects beforehand. I have several training clients still using 3.7 and 3.8, not because things would break with 3.10, but because they haven't fully vetted the newest version, and they're being super conservative.

I do wonder if companies will be a bit faster to upgrade over the coming years, given that execution speed is expected to improve rather dramatically. Upgrading won't be a matter of some nice-to-have features, but rather of real savings in system usage.



> There are very, very few breaking changes within Python 3.

But will structural pattern matching be back-ported, though?

Certainly an incompatibility, if not a breaking change per se.


GP means there are very few backwards-incompatible changes in new releases. There are plenty of forwards-incompatible ones, though.


How is pattern matching a breaking change? If your code doesn't have it how would it break?


Some people might mistakenly assume that "match" and "case" are now hard keywords, which would of course break lots of code.

But they are soft keywords, so there's no issue.




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