[exhuma]

This held up much better in the earlier days of Python.

Sooner or later every sufficiently popular programming language is confronted with the dilemma of either breaking backwards compatibility and/or adding "alternative ways to do things"

Pathlib is an interesting one. It even has a correspondence table [1]. The introduction of pathlib made sense because it is just much nicer to use. But you couldn't drop the equivalent functionality in the "os" module for backwards compatibility. It's just far too widely used.

The is no magic bullet for this one. Either you accept introducing duplication in your language or you go through a hard change (f.ex. the Python 2 to 3 change).

The softest way to migrate might be to flag functionality as deprecated and give users a fairly long time (talking years) before dropping it. But no matter how much time you give the users there will be users who won't change until it's too late.

So there really isn't a winning path for this one.

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#correspondenc...