> Tim: what version do you have in mind?

Same as always:  exactly what more-itertools has supplied for years already :-)

If the iterable is empty/exhausted, by default ValueError is raised,
but that can be overridden by also passing an optional argument to
return instead (like dict.pop() in this respect).

So, e.g.,

    first([42]) returns 42
    first([]) raises ValueError
    first([], 42) and first([], default=42) return 42