It’s becoming increasingly harder to have reasonable discussions about the differences between Python 2 and 3 because one language is dead and the other is actively developed. So when someone starts a discussion about the Unicode support between those two languages it’s not an even playing field. So I won’t discuss the actual Unicode support of those two languages but the core model of how to deal with text and bytes in both.
I will use this post to show that from the pure design of the language and standard library why Python 2 the better language for dealing with text and bytes.
Since I have to maintain lots of code that deals exactly with the path between Unicode and bytes this regression from 2 to 3 has caused me lots of grief. Especially when I see slides by core Python maintainers about how I should trust them that 3.3 is better than 2.7 makes me more than angry…
