It is one of the easiest changes to adopt though.  I added a &quot;from __future__ import print_function&quot; to 2.x code and was able to switch file-by-file without a problem.  As a function, occasionally it is more verbose but it is also a lot more flexible (they can add anything they want as new keyword arguments) and it&#x27;s compatible with any other feature of the language that would use a function.