Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Jim Lee]

On 07/15/18 16:55, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> 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*.

"Intended to be used by *everyone*" is also a grand sweeping claim - but 
I get your point.

If you define progress as the direction in which the majority moves, 
then progress is often wrong.


> 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*.
>

I do agree that it was a step in the wrong direction, but I also realize 
that it works sufficiently for many use cases (not all).

>> 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.
>

I don't want to argue over the definition of I18N.

Unicode is an attempt to solve at least one I18N issue - therefore 
Python *does* have builtin (and unavoidable) I18N features.

-Jim