First, let me start with The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge which can be summarized as: "Once you get something, it becomes hard to think how it was to be without it". I assume that all of you know difference between decode() and encode(), so you're cursed and therefore think that getting that right it is just a matter of reading documentation, experience and time. But quite a lot of had passed and Python 2 is still there, and Python 3, which is all unicode at the core (and which is great for people who finally get it) is not as popular. So, remember that you are biased towards (or against) decode/unicode perception. Now imaging a person who has a text file. The person need to process that with Python. That person is probably a journalist and doesn't know anything that "any developer should know about unicode". In Python 2 he just copy pastes regular expressions to match the letter and is happy. In Python 3 he needs to *convert* that text to unicode. Then he tries to read the documentation, it already starts to bring conflict to his mind. It says to him to "decode" the text. I don't know about you, but when I'm being told to decode the text, I assume that it is crypted, because I watched a few spy movies including ones with Sherlock Holmes and Stierlitz. But the text looks legit to me, I can clearly see and read it and now you say that I need to decode it. You're basically ruining my world right here. No wonder that I will resist. I probably stressed, has a lot of stuff to do, and you are trying to load me with all those abstract concepts that conflict with what I know. No way! Unless I have a really strong motivation (or scientific background) there is no chance to get this stuff for me right on this day. I will probably repeat the exercise and after a few tries will get the output right, but there is no chance I will remember this thing on that day. Because rewiring neural paths in my brain is much harder that paving them from scratch. -- anatoly t.