Ah Python, you have spoiled me for all other languages

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 12:58 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> I think Python is a prettier
> language visually than either Lua or Ruby, but they're in the ball-park.
> Both languages have their warts and quirks, but if Python were declared
> illegal overnight[1] I'd probably have no trouble adapting to Ruby or Lua.
> Python would still be my first love, but these two languages make a
> reasonable rebound language.

A good start. Toy programs don't always tell the whole story, though.
How good are the three languages at making your code reliable in the
face of user action? My hobby-horse, Unicode, is a notable flaw in
many languages - if you ask the user for information (in the most
obvious way for whatever environment you're in, be that via a web
browser request, or a GUI widget, or text entered at the console), can
it cope equally with all the world's languages? What if you want to
manipulate that text - is it represented as a sequence of codepoints
(Python 3), UTF-16 code units (JavaScript), UTF-8 bytes (quite a few),
or "bytes in whatever codepage your system was set to" (anything that
hasn't cared)?

ChrisA