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Comment by gtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I'm not seeing signs of these kinds of widespread issues out in the wild. The popularity of the language has continued to increase, and numerous warts and flaws were wiped out in Python 3.

That Unicode "cruft" is especially appreciated by the rest of the world that exists outside of the US. Python 2's approach to bytes and encoding is naive and horrible for 2017.

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I'll bite.

I'm outside of the US and Python 2 has worked wonderfully for ages. Its unicode support is good. You work with strings as unicode, then at I/O boundaries (and exceptions) you convert to bytes. What specifically do you find "naive and horrible" about its bytes and encodings?

Python 3 can use less memory for unicode strings (a cool optimization introduced in py3.3, IIRC), and it did away with the "narrow/wide build" distinction (same release). That's about the only every-day advantage I can think of. But I suspect that's too technical, or do you mean that?

This has been explained over and over. Those boundaries in python2 are very easy to get wrong and the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know about them until some crap data comes down the wire and code chokes or (worse) silently corrupts data. In py3 you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible.

It shouldn't take 8 years to understand this issue, and I'm positive you do understand it because you're an intelligent person, so please don't troll about it.

"With dynamic typing, the runtime will not warn you, which means you won't know until some crap data comes and your code chokes. With static typing, you are forced to explicitly Do The Right Thing, so entire classes of bugs are just Not Possible."

See what I did there?

toyg, I found your comment unbearably rude, condescending and arrogant, and downvoted it for that reason.

> See what I did there?

Confused your terminology? With static typing, the compiler will warn you, not the runtime.

Regardless, the difference is that in practice, file-handling boundary calls don't need to be as flexible as internal interfaces, and it's obviously much more difficult to figure out what The Right Thing To Do is in the latter case (or whether there is a Right Thing at all, in a lot of cases). How many times do you need to change the encoding you use for writing files? How many times do you change an internal class or type? They are totally different ballgames.

> I found your comment unbearably rude, condescending and arrogant

Apologies, but after 8 years and countless hours of bickering on this point, patience can wear really, really thin.

Have you considered that if you find yourself debating for 8 years without success, you're debating the wrong side? :)

Yes, Python 3 is an improvement over Python 2. I like Python 3. No, Python 2's unicode support was fine, contrary to OP's claim.

It's actually easier for people outside of US, who are forced to deal with languages that require Unicode to work properly. If you screw up somewhere, you notice right away.

But those for whom the majority of input is ASCII can often get away with broken code (that e.g. writes out Latin-1 JSON) for a while. And then they get input with a word like "naïve", and oh look, all hell breaks loose.

Python 3 solves this problem by making every transition problem explicit, requiring the developer to stop and think what they're doing when going from byte representation to strings, and vice versa.

"Explicit is better than implicit."

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