"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Ned Batchelder]

On 1/5/14 11:26 PM, Terry Reedy wrote:
> On 1/5/2014 8:16 PM, Ned Batchelder wrote:
>
>> OK, let's see what we got from three core developers on this list:
>
> To me, the following is a partly unfair summary.

I apologize, I'm sure there were details I skipped in my short summary.

>
>> - Antoine dismissed the post as "a rant".
>
> He called it a rant while acknowledging that there is a unsolved issue
> with transforms. Whether he was 'dismissing' it or not, I do not know.
> Antoine also noted that there does not seem to be anything new in this
> post that Armin has not said before. Without reading in detail, I had
> the same impression.
>
>> - Terry took issue with three claims made, and ended with, "I suspect
>> there are other basic errors, but I mostly quit reading at this point."
>
> You are discouraged that I quit reading? How much sludge do you expect
> me to wade through? If Armin wants my attention (and I do not think he
> does), it is *his* responsibility to write in a readable manner.
>
> But I read a bit more and found a 4th claim to 'take issue with' (to be
> polite):
> "only about 3% of all Python developers using Python 3 properly"
> with a link to
> http://alexgaynor.net/2014/jan/03/pypi-download-statistics/
> The download statistics say nothing about the percent of all Python
> developers using Python 3, let alone properly, and Alex Gaynor makes no
> such claim as Armin did.
>
> I would not be surprised if a majority of Python users have never
> downloaded from pypi. What I do know from reading the catalog-sig (pypi)
> list for a couple of years is that there are commercial developers who
> use pypi heavily to update 1000s of installations and that they drive
> the development of the pypi infrastructure. I strongly suspect that they
> strongly skew the download statistics.
>
> Dubious claim 5 is this: "For 97% of us, Python 2 is our beloved world
> for years to come". For Armin's narrow circle, that may be true, but I
> suspect that more than 3% of Python programmers have never written
> Python2 only code.
>
>> - Serhiy made a sarcastic comment comparing Python 3's bytes/unicode
>> handling with Python 2's int/str handling, implying that since int/str
>> wasn't a problem, then bytes/unicode isn't either.
>
> Serhiy's point was about the expectation of implicit conversion
> (int/str) versus (bytes/str) and the complaint about removal of implicit
> conversion. I suspect that part of his point is that if we never had
> implicit bytes/unicode conversion, it would not be expected.
>

You are still talking about whether Armin is right, and whether he 
writes well, about flaws in his statistics, etc.  I'm talking about the 
fact that an organization (Python core development) has a product 
(Python 3) that is getting bad press.  Popular and vocal customers 
(Armin, Kenneth, and others) are unhappy.  What is being done to make 
them happy?  Who is working with them?  They are not unique, and their 
viewpoints are not outliers.

I'm not talking about the technical details of bytes and Unicode.  I'm 
talking about making customers happy.

-- 
Ned Batchelder, http://nedbatchelder.com