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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

This is a hugely American point of view. For anyone who has to deal with unicode on a regular basis, the better unicode support alone is a huge improvement. That's without even looking at the advantages of Async support which offers big performance benefits for web developers—roughly 70% of Python users.

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Fair criticism. But shouldn't you be even more pissed that the Unicode release was botched and we're still talking about it more than 10 years after?

When I upgrade to a new version of C# ... nothing happens.

Backwards compatibility is what made Microsoft the company it is. I think Python deserves all the crap it gets for 2 vs 3.

They have to be backwards-compatible to persuade people to pay for their proprietary products rather than switch to another vendor.

So you're saying backwards-compatibility is awesome. I agree.

Note that the question is not "Shall we support Unicode?". Clearly we should.

The question is rather whether it would have been better to gradually improve support for it in a Python2-esque way, rather than creating a discontinuity and a raft of new problems, some of which linger to this day.

Also, for many purposes, there is wide agreement that ASCII is still the way to go. Even if Americans vanished tomorrow, the majority of remaining programmers in the world would prefer to look at source code in English, which they already know, rather than a host of other languages, most of which they don't.

There was no way to gradually improve Unicode support in Python without breaking things, because a big part of it was stuff like implicit str/unicode conversions - that were broken because they practically never use the right encoding, but that you can't remove without introducing as much breakage as Python 3 did.

You lack imagination here :) There are several solutions that could have been pursued, including introducing a completely new type and effectively duplicating the existing string library for it.

It's not just the string library that is affected. It's literally every API in the stdlib that returns a string. You'd have to fork all of those, because changing any of them to return a completely new type would be a breaking change as well.

Unicode support isn't about supporting unicode in files of source code!

They did try to do it in Python 2 and intruded Unicode type. The problem was that not only it didn't help, it is the main reason why migration to Python 3 is so painful.

You are replying out of context here. The comment I was replying to was specifically "Python3 still didn't deliver anything for most users". Which is just not true.

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