I was at europython 2006 when Guido announced that the print statement was getting axed. It was a bit of a shock to me. I think everyone in the audience was alt

I was at europython 2006 when Guido announced that the print statement was getting axed. It was a bit of a shock to me. I think everyone in the audience was altogether not quite sure where/why python 3000 was coming and so willing to patiently listen to what the master had to say about all of it. Guido's reasoning seemed to be that since a bunch of junior devs at google couldn't refactor their print statements into logging statements the print statement had to go. I don't seem to have this issue: for me the print statement is 99% used as a debugging tool. When I'm debugging I pepper my code with print statements until it tells me what is going wrong. So two extra parens every time i do this just seems unreasonable to me. Excuse my whining, but there it is. I was also at europython in 2007 when Guido once again went over the changes being wrought by python 3. This time when he got to the print statement I let out a loud "BOO!" Guido was somewhat surprised and remarked: "well no-one said anything about this when I announced it at last year's europython!" Doh.