I wonder why OrderedDict isn't outright deprecated (or reimplemented as a trivial wrapper over dict). You can get the first/last key of a 3.8 dict with dict.ke

I wonder why OrderedDict isn't outright deprecated (or reimplemented as a trivial wrapper over dict). You can get the first/last key of a 3.8 dict with dict.keys() and reversed(dict.keys()) which you can then delete to reimplement OrderedDict.popitem. Deleting a key and reinserting it will let you reimplement move_to_end. The only cool thing that OrderedDict's implementation might be useful for is to move to front (or anywhere else not the back) but it doesn't expose that api.