I've noted before and will note again that the amount of hate Python got for the 2-to-3 deprecations has led to a much worse problem: piecemeal low-visibility updates which are much harder to plan for.
As a contractor, I singlehandedly migrated 4 different codebases from 2 to 3; a total of just under a million lines of code, and none of these codebases took more than 40 hours. This was not some horrific burden for most companies using Python. The people who flamed Python for these breaking changes were either extreme outliers or the sort of people who would be happy with the language never making breaking changes, ever, no matter how bad of mistakes in design were discovered.
I would strongly prefer that datetime.utcnow were not deprecated in a 3.x release, but instead deprecated along with the GIL and any other breaking changes, in Python 4.0. Yes, it would get them flamed. And the flamers are wrong. At least that way people can plan for the transition at their leisure instead of constantly worrying that a 3.x release will unexpectedly break their codebase if they don't read the release notes before every update.
As a contractor, I singlehandedly migrated 4 different codebases from 2 to 3; a total of just under a million lines of code, and none of these codebases took more than 40 hours. This was not some horrific burden for most companies using Python. The people who flamed Python for these breaking changes were either extreme outliers or the sort of people who would be happy with the language never making breaking changes, ever, no matter how bad of mistakes in design were discovered.
I would strongly prefer that datetime.utcnow were not deprecated in a 3.x release, but instead deprecated along with the GIL and any other breaking changes, in Python 4.0. Yes, it would get them flamed. And the flamers are wrong. At least that way people can plan for the transition at their leisure instead of constantly worrying that a 3.x release will unexpectedly break their codebase if they don't read the release notes before every update.