"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 06 January 2014 08:52:42 Ned Batchelder did opine:
[...]
> 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.

+1 Ned. Quite well said.

And from my lurking here, its quite plain to me that 3.x python has a 
problem with everyday dealing with strings.  If it is not solved relatively 
quickly, then I expect there will be a fork, a 2.8 by those most heavily 
invested. Or an exodus to the next "cool" language.

No language will remain "cool" for long if it cannot simply and dependably 
solve the everyday problem of printing the monthly water bill.  If it can 
be done in assembly, C or even bash, then it should be doable in python 
even simpler.

Its nice to be able abstract the functions so they become one word macro's 
that wind up using 2 megs of program memory and 200k of stack to print 
Hello World, but I can do that with 3 or 4 lines of assembly on a coco3 
running nitros9.  Or 3 lines of C.  The assembly will use perhaps 20 bytes 
of stack, the C version maybe 30.  And the assembly will be lightening fast 
on a cpu with a less than 2 megahertz clock.

Given that the problem IS understood, a language that can simplify solving 
a problem is nice, and will be used.  But if the problem is not well 
understood, then you can write gigo crap in your choice of languages.

Python is supposed to be a problem solver, not a problem creator.

I'll get me coat. :)

Cheers, Gene
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