Suggestions:
* Deprecate _field_types in favor of __annotations__.
* Convert __annotations__ from OrderedDict to a regular dict.

This will make the API cleaner. The first one will also remove a difference between NamedTuple and namedtuple().  The second is consistent with the decision to convert _asdict() to a regular dictionary since OrderedDict is no longer necessary or desirable. The second will also make the signature of __annotations__ match that from other classes.

Good idea! This should be easy to fix/update, this was initially discussed in https://github.com/python/typing/issues/339.

Okay, I'll put together a PR and assign it to you :-)

Would it make sense to convert _field_types to a property, so the method(s) that implement the property can do:

warnings.warn("_field_types is deprecated; use __annotations__ instead", DeprecationWarning)

to indicate the deprecation programmatically, not just in the documentation? The property could be backed by __annotations__ directly; they're already aliases of one another, so the only difference in behavior would be if someone was actually reassigning _field_types after class definition time (which I'm hoping is an invalid use case...). Would save some headaches for folks who run with warnings enabled, but don't read the What's New notices in detail.

Blech. Just remembered _field_types is a *class* attribute, not an instance attribute, so it (just) can't be a plain property on NamedTuple itself.

And because NamedTuple is super-weird (AFAICT, class X(typing.NamedTuple): pass defines a class where the class is not a subclass of typing.NamedTuple, nor are its instances instances of NamedTuple, it's just wrapping an invocation of collections.namedtuple, which directly subclasses tuple with no metaclass involvement), and making a "class property" of the type we'd need requires a metaclass (which for tuple subclasses isn't an option), serious hackery or both ( https://stackoverflow.com/q/5189699/364696 ), it's probably not worth the effort to provide this warning. The only way to do it, AFAICT, would be to give the root tuple class a metaclass to provide the _field_types property, and that's a non-starter given it would, among other things, probably slow every single use of tuples just to provide the warning for this one niche case.

Boo.

New changeset f7b57df0c09c3a04ab27ba06eb2feb989bbb16cb by Miss Islington (bot) (Raymond Hettinger) in branch 'master':
bpo-36320: Switch typing.NamedTuple from OrderedDict to regular dict (GH-12396)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/f7b57df0c09c3a04ab27ba06eb2feb989bbb16cb

New changeset 0d1d7c8bae3f9fe9e937d2931dcbbd3555d1a9f1 by Serhiy Storchaka in branch '3.8':
bpo-36320: Use the deprecated-removed directive for _field_types (GH-19370)
https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/0d1d7c8bae3f9fe9e937d2931dcbbd3555d1a9f1