My big problem when reading Python code are "from" and "as" in imports.

To illustrate: I read a function doing a few calls in file, and I want to understand what happens in one of the calls (a name without any dot prefix). So I do forward search for the name in the current file (a bit silly when thinking of it, but forward slash is so close to my index finger; and in web browser the search is forward by default), and it only finds it in imports in the beginning of the file after "from". At this point I lose the context of the function I was originally reading, because I have seen other chunks of code which I try to understand a bit. Also I lose the position of the original function in the file. If I want to dive deeper to the calls, I look up the module in question.

If the name would be use with full namespace prefix, like

  import datetime
  datetime.datetime.utcnow()

^ I could immediately see which module it's coming from and go there. Straight up! I wouldn't need finger acrobatics, and it would be readable in e.g. github code viewer.

If you are really bothered by the length of the dot-prefixed names, why not do

  now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
  print(now())

^ That's all clear, and most likely you will fit to 79 chars per line.

Namespaces are a good idea, and explicit over implicit, right? I understand that there are some conventions (like _ for gettext), but I see importing names without dot prefixes as killing readability.