[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Eric Snow]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Giampaolo Rodolà <g.rodola at gmail.com> wrote:
> I bet a lot of people don't want to upgrade for another reason: unicode.
> The impression I got is that python 3 forces the user to use and
> *understand* unicode and a lot of people simply don't want to deal
> with that.
> In python 2 there was no such a strong imposition.
> Python 2 string type acting both as bytes and as text was certainly
> ambiguos and "impure" on different levels and changing that was
> definitively a win in terms of purity and correctness.
> I bet most advanced users are happy with this change.
> On the other hand, Python 2 average user was free to ignore that
> distinction even if that meant having subtle bugs hidden somewhere in
> his/her code.
> I think this aspect shouldn't be underestimated.

Isn't that more accurate for framework writers, rather than for
"average" users?  How often do average users have to address
encoding/decoding in Python 3?

-eric