Please Deprecate creation of numpy arrays for arbitrary objects. #6070

NOTE: as discussed at SciPy2015 -- just thought I'd get an issue in.

numpy currently will default to making an dtype-object array for anything it can't make other sense of.

This is hardly ever what someone would want. For example, I just banged my head against a bug due to this:

In [5]: np.array(object)
Out[5]: array(<type 'object'>, dtype=object)

Granted, due to a stupid typo -- but why would anyone want this?

When a user does want the object dtype, numpy almost never can get it right by default anyway, so it's not much burden to have to specify the object dtype if you really want that.