Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Ed Kellett <e+python-list at kellett.im>:
> So, Marko, I don't know what code you work on, but I think it's unfair
> to attack Python 3's unicode handling too hard if you haven't written
> a new project with it.

I don't believe the problem was solely in the difficulty of conversion.
It was primarily in the tricky (and apparently pointless)
decision-making. Which of these are text (really) and bytes (really):

 * Pathnames
 * Commands
 * Stdin/Stdout/Stderr
 * environment variables
 * URIs
 * HTTP header field names
 * HTTP header field values
 * HTTP methods
 * HTTP content
 * SMTP messages
 * Email messages
 * Base64 encodings
 * Hexadecimal encodings
 * JSON encoding

and so on.

And BTW, I have implemented an SMTP server in Python3 from scratch, and
was struggling with similar issues. The code riddled with lines like
this:

      conn.request('EHLO {}\r\n'.format(domain).encode())

In Linux protocol and system programming, text is just the wrong
abstraction. I doubt there are very many situations where Python3's
UTF-32 strings are a more opportune abstraction than UTF-8 strings are.


Marko