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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

They aren't being removed, they will just toss up a warning.

They will be removed:

    datetime.datetime’s utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() are deprecated and will be removed in a future version.

Aren’t now, “will be” in a future version. So the can will be kicked down the road as many generations of devs as needed until no one cares any longer.

So, they remove it in 12 months and your code wasn't ready for the change, and people mock you for having not been prepared by updating your code. The Python people have told you to remove it, so nobody will have any sympathy for you if you don't do it. As you demonstrated, people are sticklers for quoting exact wording when it comes to criticizing others.

I’m not criticizing. This wording is chosen for this exact reason. Otherwise they would say precisely when they intend to remove it.

Has anything in Python been removed in 12 months? TestCase.assertEquals was deprecated in Python 3.2 (February 2011) and was finally removed in Python 3.12 (October 2023). And that was 12 years for just a simple rename from "assertEquals" to "assertEqual".

Seems like it doesn't happen that fast. audioop was deprecated in 2019, will be removed soon in 3.13: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-3130a2/

Stupid decisions don't always get put into practice after they're announced.

I seem to remember reading that remove-if-not is deprecated in Common Lisp, and that this is almost universally viewed as a mistake, but it remains deprecated (and the deprecation is ignored by everyone) just because the standard doesn't change anymore.

Sure, but nothing is going to break from the deprecation.

(It's going to break from the eventual removal)

The warning is also opt-in; you'll have to run python with PYTHONWARNINGS=always or similar to see it.

Which is scary, because you will be taking the performance hit from generating the warning regardless, which can easily amount to 30% of your total CPU time if you use utcnow/utcfromtimestamp a lot.

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