Python 3 was born out of necessity. One of Python 2's major annoyances was its inconsistent handling of non-English characters (commonly manifested as the infamous UnicodeDecodeError). Guido initiated the Python 3 project to clean up a number of such language issues while breaking backward compatibility.
The first alpha release of Python 3.0 was made in August 2007. Since then, Python 2 and Python 3 have been in parallel development by the core development team for a number of years. Eventually, Python 3 is expected to be the future of the language.
