On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 8:07 AM, Martti Kühne
Python actively encourages you to write the python shebang explicitly either #!/usr/bin/env python2 or #!/usr/bin/env python3 for scripts that are not compatible with one of them. It is no longer practical to make any assumptions about the python version in the (unversioned) python binary, therefore your argument about java doesn't hold. Since the developers themselves support this conclusion [0], there is no reason to still have the symlink and hence we should actually abolish it completely, which I expect to happen in the long run.
Actually, I believe the default /usr/bin/python symlink makes sense to have, in order to be used for python scripts that don't care which python they use. Let us assume someone has only python3 or python2, does it make sense to prevent people from using polyglot code simply because an arbitrary decision was made to assume one or the other is the official python version to run the code under? -- Eli Schwartz