One big problem they had was that they felt that hosting multiple Python versions on a system was a sysadmin problem, not a language runtime problem.
This is an issue because many platforms and products shipped with some python2 scripts. So a developer trying to use python3 needed to start by setting up a mixed environment on their own.
Ruby could get away with crap like that because it wasn't widely used outside of Rails before rvm/rbenv was common.
Setting up python3 as the default python could break certain Linux distros.
Even today MacOS ships with python 2.7 as the default.
This is an issue because many platforms and products shipped with some python2 scripts. So a developer trying to use python3 needed to start by setting up a mixed environment on their own.
Ruby could get away with crap like that because it wasn't widely used outside of Rails before rvm/rbenv was common.
Setting up python3 as the default python could break certain Linux distros.
Even today MacOS ships with python 2.7 as the default.