As the maintainer of a Python project that is 2.7 and 3.3+ compatible on the same code base, there is nothing super easy about it. It's horrific actually. Enough so that I'll never do it again. It goes far beyond just print functions. Libraries like `six` help, but the subtle differences in how Unicode handling has changed makes it a real challenge.
I've written a largish project (~10k lines) targeting 2.7 and another one for 3.4. Other than the new features present in Python 3 (function annotations and asyncio), my code style has not changed at all. Neither project deals directly with unicode encoding/decoding however.
I've read all the relevant material. That doesn't mean it isn't painful. The same author of that blog post wrote another blog post complaining about how Unicode is handled in Python 3.
