The print statement is/was a beautiful thing that dates to antiquity (e.g. Python 1 and BASIC), and one that many people loved. It was also used extensively.
Removing it (and breaking compatibility in general with no easy workarounds) is one of the major footguns in Python 3 that drastically slowed its adoption and basically forked the language.
It's a prime example of ideology trumping usability and practicality, resulting in the waste of probably millions of programmer hours, and orphaning millions of lines of code in Python 2 programs and libraries.
Other languages have managed to evolve effectively for decades without breaking backward compatibility; it's disappointing and embarrassing that Python simply hasn't.
Removing it (and breaking compatibility in general with no easy workarounds) is one of the major footguns in Python 3 that drastically slowed its adoption and basically forked the language.
It's a prime example of ideology trumping usability and practicality, resulting in the waste of probably millions of programmer hours, and orphaning millions of lines of code in Python 2 programs and libraries.
Other languages have managed to evolve effectively for decades without breaking backward compatibility; it's disappointing and embarrassing that Python simply hasn't.