[BuckRogers]

It's worth nothing that I think Python's success and simplicity came from the ease of use and flexibility. It should have Go's strings. You have a point there. The type annotations are really jumping the shark too, it's just no longer the language that once made so much sense.

On the consensus on bytestrings assumed as UTF8, there's only 1 new language without legacy baggage that has skyrocketing popularity and it has bytestrings assumed as UTF8. Everyone I've surveyed says that's no coincidence, including members of the Python core dev team. So that's where I'm seeing consensus on the string issue. While Python3 has struggled and folks are rightly irritated. Because some were irresponsible everyone has to pay, that's not really how I viewed Python's strengths prior to 3.x. Zed said it best but it really was one of the best examples of how dynamic typing can be fun.