[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Terry Reedy]

On 2/9/2012 2:16 PM, Giampaolo Rodolà 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.

Do *you* think that? Or or you reporting what others think? In either 
case, we have another communication problem. If one only uses the ascii 
subset, the usage of 3.x strings is transparent. As far as I can think, 
one does not need to know *anything* about unicode to use 3.x. In 3.3, 
there will not even be a memory hit. We should be saying that.

Thanks for the head's up. It is hard to know what misconceptions people 
have until someone reports them ;-).

> In python 2 there was no such a strong imposition.

Nor is there in 3.x. We need to communicate that. I may give it a try on 
python-list. If and when one does want to use more characters, it should 
be *easier* in 3.x than in 2.x, especially for non-Latin1 Western 
European chars .

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy