[Python-Dev] Python3 "complexity"

[Ben Finney]

Kristján Valur Jónsson <kristjan at ccpgames.com> writes:

> I didn't used to must.  Why must I must now?  Did the universe just
> shift when I fired up python3?

In a sense, yes. The world of software has been shifting for decades, as
a reasult of broader changes in how different segments of humanity have
changed their interactions, and thereby changed their expectations of
what computers can do with their data.

While for some programmers, in past decades, it used to be reasonable to
stick one's head in the sand and ignore all encodings except one
privileged local encoding, that is no longer reasonable today. As a
result, it is incumbent on any programmer working with text to care
about text encodings.

You've likely already seen it, but the point I'm making is better made
in this essay <URL:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>.

-- 
 \                                                己所不欲、勿施于人。 |
  `\                (What is undesirable to you, do not do to others.) |
_o__)                             —孔夫子 Confucius, 551 BCE – 479 BCE |
Ben Finney