Matt Joiner writes:
This is a great argument. But people want to see new, bigger better things in the standard library, and the #1 reason cited against this is "we already have too much". I think that's where the issue lies: Either lots of cool nice stuff is added and supported (we all want our favourite things in the standard lib for this reason), and or the old stuff lingers...
Deprecated features are pretty much irrelevant to the height of the bar for new features. The problem is that there are a limited number of folks doing long term maintenance of the standard library, and an essentially unlimited supply of one-off patches to add cool new features (not backed by a long term warranty of maintenance by the contributor). So deprecated features do add some burden of maintenance for the core developers, as Michael points out -- but removing *all* of them on short notice would not really make it possible to *add* features *in a maintainable way* any faster.
I'm sure a while ago there was mention of a "staging" area for inclusion in the standard library. This attracts interest, stabilization, and quality from potential modules for inclusion.
But there's no particular reason to believe it will attract more contributors willing to do long-term maintenance, and *somebody* has to maintain the staging area.