I've never understood why that phrase applies to Python when the language still has the map, filter, reduce, etc. functional functions. Generators and comprehensions completely removed the need for those, yet the functions remain even in Python 3.

On the subject of printing, there are actual reasons for having this duplicate functionality. The main way to print is of course the print function in three, or print statement in two. The print function was lacking the ability to flush the buffer before that was introduced in three. You would have to call sys.stdout.flush(), whereas now the print function includes the boolean "flush" keyword argument. The second way to print is to call sys.stdout.write(), which does not automatically append a newline. That functionality was implemented in the print function with the "end" keyword argument. You can pass it an empty string in place of the newline.

So for most use cases, print() is just fine. Sometimes you want finer grained control, and for that you would use the sys module.