End-user experience isn't something that can just be argued away. Steve and I are reporting a recurring annoyance. The point of a beta release is to elicit these kinds of reports so they can be addressed before it is too late. ISTM you are choosing not to believe the early feedback and don't want to provide a mitigation. This decision reverses 25+ years of Python practice and is the software equivalent of telling users "you're holding it wrong". Instead of an awareness campaign to use the silent-by-default warnings, we're going directly towards breaking working code. That seems pretty user hostile to me. Chris's language survey one shows only language, Lua, that treated this an error. For compiled languages that emit warnings, the end-user will never see those warning so there is no end-user consequence. In our case though, end-users will see the messages and may not have an ability to do anything about it. I wish people with more product management experience would chime in; otherwise, 3.8 is going to ship with an intentional hard-to-ignore annoyance on the premise that we don't like the way people have been programming and that they need to change their code even if it was working just fine.