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by ollien 944 days ago
It is one that can be found via static analysis. That may not be true if behavior is changed. In some cases, this may be "ok" (see: Go's recent loop changes), but in others, it may not.
1 comments

Most Python users don't do any form of static analysis though, so both changes would only be found at runtime.

But I think changing the behaviour and not the name is still a very bad idea.

Yes, but "Unknown function datetime.utcnow" is much easier to diagnose than somewhere in your application, possibly inside a third-party library or maybe even in a different service altogether (because the change traversed serialization and deserilialization) throwing an exception because you can't compare two datetimes.