Legacy Code

In a discussion with Guido van Rossum, the focus was on managing legacy code in Python, specifically Python's move from Python 2 to Python 3. They addressed issues that frequently troubled users, known as "warts" in Python, which often could not be resolved in a backward-compatible manner. This led to deliberate design changes in Python 3 to fix these issues despite breaking compatibility with Python 2. This situation illustrates a critical decision point in managing legacy code—choosing to improve and innovate at the potential cost of backward compatibility 1.