Deprecating direct string indexing might have been the "right" move in some sense but it's hard to imagine it ever happening in Python; it's such a natural and

Deprecating direct string indexing might have been the "right" move in some sense but it's hard to imagine it ever happening in Python; it's such a natural and frequently-used operation in the language that you would've broken an enormous amount of code. Because indexing strings is syntactically identical to indexing lists, and because there's no* real static typing, there'd be no* good and robust way to automate the conversion. Like, the changes Python 3 made were honestly pretty subtle, and nearly 15 years later there's still people reluctant to upgrade. If they broke string indexing I'm pretty sure Python 3 adoption would make Perl 6 uptake look impressive.