"More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3"

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 06 Jan 2014 16:32:01 -0500, Ned Batchelder wrote:

> On 1/6/14 12:50 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I use the term "customer" in the larger sense of, "someone using your
> product that you are trying to please."  I'd like to think that an open
> source project with only users would treat them as customers.  Not in
> the sense of a legal obligation in exchange for money, but in the sense
> that the point of the work is to please them.

But isn't the strength of open source that people write software that 
pleases *themselves*, and if others can make use of it, we all win? If GvR 
wrote Python to please others, it would have braces, it would be more 
like Perl and C, and it would probably be a mess.

All else being equal, it's better for open source software if your users 
are happy than if they are unhappy, but at what cost? You can't make 
everyone happy.


[...]
> I was only avoiding talking about Unicode vs bytes because I'm not the
> one who needs a better way to do it, Armin and Kenneth are.  You seem to
> be arguing from the standpoint of, "I've never had problems, so there
> are no problems."

Certainly not. I've tried hard not to say, or imply, that Armin is wrong. 
I know he is an extremely competent Python developer, and I don't 
understand his problem domain well enough to categorically say he's 
wrong. I *suspect* he's doing something wrong, or at least sub-optimally, 
and making things more difficult for himself than they need be, but what 
do I know? Maybe that's just my wishful thinking.


> I suspect an undercurrent here is also the difference between writing
> Python 3 code, and writing code that can run on both Python 2 and 3.

Of course. It's always harder to target multiple versions with 
incompatibilities than a single version.


> In my original post, I provided two possible responses, one of which
> you've omitted: work with Armin to explain the easier way that he has
> missed.  

Isn't that just another way of saying what I said earlier?

"try to educate Armin (and others) so they stop blaming Python for their 
own errors"

Although your version is more diplomatic.


> It sounds like you think there isn't an easier way, and that's
> OK? I would love to see a Python 3 advocate work with Armin or Kenneth
> on the code that's caused them such pain, and find a way to make it
> good.

Is it a good think that there's code that's hard to write in Python 3? 
Not in isolation. But sometimes when you design a language, you 
implicitly or explicitly decide that certain types of code will not be a 
good fit for that language: you can't write an efficient operating system 
kernel in Python. Maybe you can't easily do the sort of low-level network 
stuff that Armin is trying to do in Python 3. But I doubt it. I expect 
that probably half the problem is that he's missing something, or doing 
something wrong, and the other half is that Python 3 genuinely makes it 
harder than it should be. But again, what do I know?


> It's clear from other discussions happening elsewhere that there is the
> possibility of improving the situation, for example PEP 460 proposing
> "bytes % args" and "bytes.format(args)".  That's good.


I don't know... if byte formatting ends up encouraging people to use 
bytes when they ought to use strings, maybe it will be an attractive 
nuisance and in the long-term do more harm than good. But I'm keeping an 
open mind.



-- 
Steven