Python 3 is killing Python

[Neil D. Cerutti]

On 7/16/2014 10:27 AM, Frank Millman wrote:
> Would this have been so easy using Python2 - I don't think so. What follows
> is blatant speculation, but it is quite possible that there are many
> non-English speakers out there that have had their lives made much easier by
> the changes to Python3  - a 'silent majority'? I don't mean an absolute
> majority, as I believe there are still more Python2 users than Python3. But
> of those who have made the switch from 2 to 3, maybe most of them are quite
> happy. If so, then the python devs got that right as well.

Python3 has helped me cope with unexpected non-ASCII characters in other 
systems on our university campus while using a program written back 
before I knew anything about unicode.

When I first spotted mojibake appearing in a student's name and address, 
it was only a couple of emails and a little investigation to determine 
which encoding= bits to sprinkle into my program. And I was finished.

I wrote these applications a decade ago in Python2, and never worried 
about unicode. I translated them to Python3 years ago, and still never 
worried about unicode. The database is supposed to be sanitized against 
non-ASCII by an address and name-scrubbing application, which we aspend 
large amounts of cash on (I don't understand why, but that's what we do).

And thanks to Python3, even though "illegal" characters have crept in, 
and even though I had never worried about unicode before, I could fix my 
program(s) the instant I knew which encodings to use. It would have been 
much harder to get right using Python2.
-- 
Neil Cerutti