Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 11:22:11 -0700, James Lee wrote:

> On 7/15/2018 3:43 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>> No. The real ten billion dollar question is how people in 2018 can
>> stick their head in the sand and take seriously the position that
>> Latin-1 (let alone ASCII) is enough for text strings.
>>
>>
>>
> Easy - for many people, 90% of the Python code they write is not
> intended for world-wide distribution, let alone use.

But they're not making claims about what works for *them*. If they did, 
I'd say "Okay, that works for you. Sorry you got left behind by 
progress." They're making grand sweeping claims about what works best for 
a language intended to be used by *everyone*.

Marko isn't saying "I know my use-case is atypical, but I inherited a 
code base where the bytes/pseudo-text duality of Python2 strings was 
helpful to me, and Python3's strict division into byte strings and text 
strings is less useful."

Rather, he is making the sweeping generalisation that having a text 
string type *at all* is a mistake, because the Python 2 dual bytes+pseudo 
text approach is superior, *for everyone*.


 
> The smart thing would be for a language to have a switch of some sort to
> turn on/off all I18N features.

The Python language has no builtin I18N features.




-- 
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing
it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson