[Python-ideas] Python's Source of Randomness and the random.py module Redux

[Random832]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2015, at 15:14, Paul Moore wrote:
> * My argument is that breaking backward compatibility needs to be
> justified.

I don't think it does. I think that there needs to be a long roadmap of
deprecation and provided workarounds for *almost any*
backwards-compatibility-breaking change, but that special justification
beyond "is this a good feature" is only needed for ignoring that
roadmap, not for deprecating/replacing a feature in line with it.

No-one, as far as I have seen in this thread to date, has actually put a
timeline on this change. No-one's talking about getting rid of the
global functions in 3.5.1, or in 3.6, or in 3.7. So with that in mind I
can only conclude that the people against making the change are against
*ever* making it *at all* - and certainly a lot of the arguments they're
making have to do with nebulous educational use-cases (class instances
are hard, let's use mutable global state) rather than backwards
compatibility. Would you likewise have been against every single thing
that Python 3 did?