Yes, and this is my fundamental complaint with the Python 3 transition. It took probably millions of engineer-hours, and the result was better Unicode support and a handful of minor features most of which could have been added to Python 2 just as easily. I suspect most users would gladly have traded those benefits for a 10x performance improvement.
Yes, and I wish the better Unicode support had been implemented similarly to how Go does it - one string type, and you use it to hold UTF-8 if needed. In other words, they could've simply deprecated the Python 2.X unicode object and added libraries to extract code points, or grapheme clusters, or perform normalization etc... This seems much simpler and more "Pythonic".
I guess everything is 20/20 in hindsight.
Different Unicode support. And worse bytes support.
What could previously be done using python -c "..." is now long, horrible and ugly.
I feel like you're the first person I've seen on the planet to echo my sentiments on these. I expect a lot of people will jump here to tell you you're wrong like they have to me, so just wanted to let you know I've felt exactly these pains and agree with you.
The fundamental problem as I see it is that "string" is a grossly leaky and misunderstood abstraction. The string type is not the same thing as a "text" type. It's being used in all the wrong places for that purpose. People treat "string" like it means "text", but in so many places where we deal with them, they just aren't (and should never be) text. Everything from stdio to argv to file paths to environment variables to "text" files to basically any interface with the outside world needs to be dealt with in bytes rather than text if you care about actually producing correct code that doesn't lose, corrupt, or otherwise choke on data.
C++ understood this and got it right, preferring to focus on optimizing rather than constraining the string type. Many other languages did pretty well by avoiding enforcing encodings on strings, too. And Python 2 defaulted to bytes as well, and only really cared about encoding/decoding at I/O boundaries where it thought it can assume it's dealing with text (though it sometimes didn't behave well there, and yes it got painful as a result). Then Python 3 came along and just made everyone start treating most data as if they're inherently (Unicode) text by default, when they really had no such constraints to begin with.
It boggles my mind that Python 3 folks like to beat the drum on how Python 3 got the bytes/unicode right without taking a single moment to even notice that most strings people deal with aren't (and never were!) actually guaranteed to be in a specific, known textual encoding a priori. They were just arrays of code units with few restrictions on them, and if you want to write correct code, you're going to have to deal with bytes by default (or something else with similar flexibility) instead of text. It would've been totally fine to introduce a text type, but it fundamentally can't take the place of a blob type, which is the language of the outside world.
Java uses UTF-16 throughout, including file paths. So does .NET. All Apple platforms are UTF-16. C++ - if you just look at stdlib, sure, it's byte-centric; but then look at popular frameworks such as Qt.
In practice, this means that, yeah, you can have that odd filename that is technically not Unicode. But the vast majority of code running on the most popular desktop and mobile platforms is going to handle it in a way that expects it to be Unicode. Why should Python go against the trend, and make life more complicated for developers using it in the process?
That HTML you just fetched? How do you know it's Unicode?
That .txt file the user just asked to load? How do you know that's Unicode?
For heaven's sake, when can you actually guarantee that even sys.stdin.read() is going to read Unicode? You can only do that when you're the one piping your own stdin... which is not the common case.
What do you do when your fundamentally invalid assumptions break? Do you just not care and simply present a stack trace to the user and tell them to get lost?
I've gotten tired of these debates though, so just a heads up I may not have the energy to reply if you continue...
Headers contain information about the charset. If the charset isn't specified then only god knows the used encoding. This applies to all encodings. If they aren't specified you can't interpret them.
>That .txt file the user just asked to load? How do you know that's Unicode?
If you don't know the used encoding then you simply cannot interpret the file as a string. If the encoding isn't specified you can't interpret the file.
>For heaven's sake, when can you actually guarantee that even sys.stdin.read() is going to read Unicode?
Again if the encoding isn't specified then all bets are off. This is an inherent problem with unix pipes. Text isn't any different than say a protobuffer packet. You have to know how to interpret it otherwise it's just a raw byte array without any meaning.
>What do you do when your fundamentally invalid assumptions break? Do you just not care and simply present a stack trace to the user and tell them to get lost?
I don't understand you at all. Just load it as a byte array if you don't care about the encoding. If you do care about the encoding then tough luck. You're never going to understand the meaning of that text unless it is an agreed upon encoding like UTF-8 and in that case the assumptions of always choosing UTF-8 are part of the value proposition.
Let me tell you why reading a text file as a byte array and pretending that character encodings don't exist is a bad idea. There are lots of Asian character encodings that don't even contain the latin alphabet. Now imagine you are running source.replace("Donut", "Bagel"). What meaning does running this function have on a byte array? It doesn't have any.
That operation simply cannot be implemented at all if you don't know the encoding. So if you were to choose the python 2 way then you would have to either remove all string operations from the language or force the user to specify the encoding on every operation.
A string literal like "Donut" isn't just a string literal. It has a representation and you first have to convert the logical string into a byte array that matches the representation of the source string. Lets say your python program is loading UTF-16 text. Instead of simply specifying the encoding you just load the text without any encoding. If you wanted to run the replace operation then it would have to look like something like this: source.replace("Donut".getBytes("UTF-16"), "Bagel".getBytes("UTF-16")). This is because you need to convert all string literals to match the encoding of the text that you want to replace.
Well, doesn't this cause a pretty huge problem? You now need to have a special type just for string literals because the runtime string type can use any encoding and therefore isn't guaranteed to be able to represent the logical value of a literal. Isn't that extremely weird?
Which was my entire point!! You have to go to bytes to get correct behavior. They didn't fix the nonsense by changing the default data type to a string, they just made it even more roundabout to write correct code.
> It just made it impossible to inadvertently treat bytes as a string in a certain encoding
It most certainly did not! It's like you completely ignored what I just told you. I already gave you an example: sys.stdin.read(). Uses some encoding when you really can't ever guarantee any encoding, or when the encoding info itself, is embedded in the byte stream is the normal case. How do can you know a priori what the user piped in? Are you sure users magically know every stream's encoding and just neglecting to provide it to you? At least if they were bytes by default, you'd maintain correct state and only have to worry about encoding/decoding at the I/O boundary. (And to top off the insanity, it's not even UTF-8 everywhere; on Windows it's CP-1252 or something, so you can't even rely on the default I/O being portable across platforms, even for text! Let alone arbitrary bytes. This insanity was there in Python 2, but they sure didn't make it better by moving from bytes to text as the default...)
Python 2.7.17 (v2.7.17:c2f86d86e6, Oct 19 2019, 21:01:17) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on
win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> s = raw_input()
abc
>>> s
'abc'
>>> s + u"!"
u'abc!'
Python 2 did this implicit conversion, because it allowed it to have APIs that returned either bytes or unicode objects, and the API client could basically pretend that there's no difference (again, only for ASCII in practice). By removing the conversion, Python 3 forced developers to think whether the data that they're working with is text or binary, and to apply the correct encoding if it's binary that is encoded text. This is exactly encoding/decoding at the I/O boundary!
The fact that sys.stdout encoding varies between platforms is a feature, not a bug. For text data, locale defines the encoding; so if you are treating stdin and stdout as text, then Python 3 will use locale encoding to encode/decode at the aforementioned I/O boundary, as other apps expect it to do (e.g. if you pipe the output). This is exactly how every other library or framework that deals with Unicode text works; how is that "insanity"?
Now, if you actually want to work with binary data for stdio, then you need to use the underlying BytesIO objects: sys.stdin.buffer and sys.stdout.buffer. Those have read() and write() that deal with raw bytes. The point, again, is that you are forced to consider your choices and their consequences. It's not the same API that tries to cover both binary and text input, and ends up with unsafe implicit conversions because that's the only way to make it look even remotely sane.
The only thing I could blame Python 3 for here is that sys.stdin is implicitly text. It would be better to force API clients to be fully explicit - e.g. requiring people to use either sys.stdin.text or sys.stdin.binary. But either way, this is strictly better than Python 2.
No, it's utterly false that every other framework does it. Where do you even get this idea? Possibly the closest language to Python is Ruby. Have you tried to see what it does? Run ruby -e "$stdout.write(\"\u2713\")" > temp.txt in the Command Prompt and then tell me you face the same nonsensical Unicode error as you do in Python (python -c "import sys; sys.stdout.write(u\"\u2713\")" > temp.txt)? The notion that writing text on one platform and reading it back on another should produce complete garbage is absolute insanity. You're literally saying that even if I write some text to a file in Windows and then read it back on Linux with the same program on the same machine from the same file system, it is somehow the right thing to do to have an inconsistent behavior and interpret it as complete garbage?? Like this means if you install Linux for your grandma and have her open a note she saved in Windows, she will actively want to read mojibake?? I mean, I guess people are weird, so maybe you or your grandma find that to be a sane state of affairs, but neither me, nor my grandma, nor my programs (...are they my babies in this analogy?) would expect to see gibberish when reading the same file with the same program...
As for "Python 3 forced developers to think whether the data that they're working with is text or binary", well, it made them think even more than they already had to, alright. That happens as a result of breaking stuff even more than it happens as a result of fixing stuff. And what I've been trying to tell you repeatedly is that this puristic distinction between "text" and "binary" is a fantasy and utterly wrong in most of the scenarios where it's actually made, and that your "well then just use bytes" argument is literally what I've been pointing out is the only solution, and it's much closer to what Python 2 was doing. This isn't even something that's somehow tricky. If you write binary files at all, you know there's absolutely no reason why you can't mix and match encodings in a single stream. You also know it's entirely reasonable to record the encoding inside the file itself. But regardless, just in case this was a foreign notion, I gave you multiple examples of this that are incredibly common—HTML, XML, stdio, text files... and you just dodged my point. I'll repeat myself: when you read text—if you can even guarantee it's text in the first place (which you absolutely cannot do everywhere Python 3 does)—it is likely to have an encoding that neither you nor the user can know a priori until after you've read it and examined its bytes. XML/HTML/BOM/you name it. You have to deal with bytes until you make that determination. The fact that you might read complete garbage if you read back the same file your own program wrote on another platform just adds insult to the injury.
But anyway. You know full well that I never suggested everything was fine in Python 2 and that everything broke in Python 3. I was extremely clear that a lot of this was already a problem, and that some stuff did in fact improve. It's the other stuff got worse and even harder to address that's the problem I've been talking about. So it's a pretty illegitimate counterargument to cherrypick some random bit about some implicit conversion that actually happened to improve. At best you'll derail the argument into a discussion about alternative approaches for solving those problems (which BTW actually do exist) and distract me. But I'm not about to waste my energy like this, so I'm going to have to leave this as my last comment.
Ruby is actually the odd one out with its "string is bytes + encoding" approach; and that mostly because its author is Japanese - Japan is not all sold on Unicode for some legitimate reasons. This approach also has some interesting consequences - e.g. it's possible for string concatenation to fail, because there's no unified representation for both operands.
Not really; they are similar in that they are dynamic scripting languages, but philosophically and in terms of almost every implementation decision, they are pretty radically opposed.
How many things are stored as binary files?
> All Apple platforms are UTF-16.
I'm glad all their executable files are apparently text files. How amazing.
> Why should Python go against the trend, and make life more complicated for developers using it in the process?
You tell me why Python3 did that.
Without fuzz? No, sorry, it was anything but.
First of all it would default encoding to "ASCII". Have any whiff of non-explicitly handled UTF-8 and it would just go bang at the worse time possible.
That was a stupid decision
"Oh but there was setdefaultencoding" Yeah here's the first result for that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3828723/why-should-we-no...
So no, Python2 way of dealing with Unicode was the most annoying way possible, because hey who needs anything but ASCII right?
The part about defaulting to ASCII is annoying, yes. And using sys.setdefaultencoding to change the default would still be annoying, yes. The reason for that is that any default encoding will be annoying whenever the actual encoding when the program is running doesn't match the default.
The correct way to fix this problem is to not have a default encoding at all. Don't try to auto-detect encodings; don't try to guess encodings. Force every encode and decode operation to explicitly specify an encoding. That way the issue of what the encoding is, how to detect it, etc., is handled in the right place--in the code of the particular application that needs to use Unicode. It should not be handled in a language runtime or a standard library, precisely because there is no way for a language runtime or a library to properly deal with all use cases of all applications.
What Python 3 did, instead, was to change the rules of default encodings and auto-detection/guessing of encodings, so that they were nicer to some use cases, and even more annoying than before to others.
Whereas python3 is just waiting to explode the moment there are bytes in your UTF-8 that are invalid.
Oh the http request got truncated to leave invalid utf-8 in an otherwise fine utf-8 response? FUCKING ERROR.
There have been plenty of people with similar sentiments. I'm one of them. I have felt ever since I first looked at Python 3 that the ways in which it broke backward incompatibility were heavily skewed towards a few particular use cases and did not take into account the needs of all of the Python community.
Contrast with Java, which has made much more substantial changes to the language over all these years, but goes to great pains to support backwards compatibility. Upgrading major Java versions was never remotely as painful, and as a result, huge amounts of engineering time was saved.
There's so much whining, when they gave over 5 years to do the migration. I think the whole problem was that they gave too much time, and people were thinking it will be like that forever.
Also, Java is not a dynamic language, the type system allows for easy fix of issues like these, the python solution to do that is mypy, but it requires work by adding types.
You make it sound so generous of the Python maintainers to "give over five years" before breaking backwards compatibility--something that C, Java, JavaScript, C++, and probably most other languages haven't done for decades, or in some cases ever. Programming languages are serious basic infrastructure, programmer time is valuable, and Python's installed base is large enough that many man-centuries were probably wasted on this migration.
If the Python maintainers had not given as much time as they did, I doubt the Python community or ecosystem would have transitioned any more quickly than they did. More likely would have been some fork or alternate implementation of Python 2 becoming the new standard.
Reverse compatibility isn't free.
Unfortunately clang and gcc don't (yet?) have --safe or an x86-64-safe compilation target.
I guess it's a matter of emphasis, but I'd say it has different Unicode support. It's better mildly for some use cases, but worse for others.
It's bloody horrible for one use case in particular: when you know the text is readable and mostly ASCII based and you are only interested in the ASCII bits, but don't know the encoding. That is the position you find yourself in for any designed in pre-unicode times, and that happens to include just about every file in a Unix file system.
The solution in those circumstances is to treat everything as bytes (b''). That wasn't even possible in the beginning. Now it mostly works, but all with hundreds of corner exceptions (like Exception messages, so you can't easily include a Unix filename in an error message).
But yes the only people who wanted better unicode were web people. So they could have been better served moving to pypy.