> The `print()` function is nice, but they could have left in the `print` statement for a transitional (deprecation) period. Or left the `print` statement in, a

> The `print()` function is nice, but they could have left in the `print` statement for a transitional (deprecation) period. Or left the `print` statement in, and advise against its use. They did, it's from __future__ import print_function. python2.7 was, essentially, the transitional deprecation period you mention, and it lasted a decade. > A lot of the incompatibilities are just stdlib modules being moved around unnecessarily. six.moves > - All the new features in Python 3 (async, nice helper functions, etc.) are compatible with Python 2. They could have added them to Python 2. This assumes a level of similarity in the py2 and py3 codebases that isn't true in practice. There are different bytecodes and 3.0 only optimizations. Backporting some of these is possible, but not a reasonable burden. >The Python 2 stdlib could have been made compatible with both types of strings (as nearly all third-party libraries have). I don't know what you're working with, but most third party libs aren't compatible with both types of strings. They're compatible with str or bytes, but not both except in rare and usually wrong cases. Importing unicode literals only sometimes solves the issues, and often times introduces different problems.