"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Steven D'Aprano]

Ned Batchelder wrote:

> 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.

Oh? How much did Armin pay for his Python support? If he didn't pay, he's
not a customer. He's a user.

When something gets bad press, the normal process is to first determine just
how justified that bad press is. (Unless, of course, you're more interested
in just *covering it up* than fixing the problem.) The best solutions are:

- if the bad press is justified, admit it, and fix the problems;

- if the bad press is not justified, try to educate Armin (and others) so
they stop blaming Python for their own errors; try to counter their bad
press with good press; or ignore it, knowing that the internet is
notoriously fickle and in a week people will be hating on Go, or Ruby
instead.

But I get the idea from your post that you don't want to talk about the
technical details of bytes and Unicode, and by extension, whether Python 3
is better or worse than Python 2. That makes it impossible to determine how
valid the bad press is, which leaves us hamstrung. Our only responses are:

- Patronise him. "Yes yes, you poor little thing, we feel your pain. But
what can we do about it?"

- Abuse him and hope he shuts up.

- Give in to his (and by extension, everyone elses) complaints, whether
justified or not, and make Python worse.

- Counter his bad press with good press, and come across as arrogant idiots
by denying actual real problems (if any).

- Wait for the Internet to move on.



-- 
Steven