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I don't have a problem with Python 3's unicode support, and I don't really understand why people do. I think it works fine, you just want to think of b'' as byte arrays instead of strings. If you're ever carrying a bytes around and passing it into string handling functions, you're Doing It Wrong. Honestly, I can't find anything wrong with Python 3's Unicode support. It's great.

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Exactly. Its clear distinction between (unicode) strings and (binary) data is Python 3's biggest plus, imho. No more randomly popping up errors because something is trying to handle the binary data in your str as string; instead you'll get a nice type error. I don't understand how people do _not_ find that terribly annoying with Python 2. (seriously, tell me)

Gut feeling: there is a large intersection between the "Python 3 Unicode sucks" and "Every operating system ought to handle only bytes and never think of encoding, and file names and paths are just bytes". I have words for the latter attitude, but they're not HN-compatible.

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