[meowface]

This philosophy is similar to Python 3's hard separation of bytes and strings. Bytes are raw data you get off the wire and which are encoded in a certain way. Once decoded into a string, you have a clean, consistent internal representation that behaves as you expect a string would. If you're juggling (or even thinking about) byte encodings past the parsing stage and before the output stage, you've done something wrong.

[ben0x539]

Yeah, it generalizes to an argument for using types to encode assumptions about data, so you have static certainty/remove dynamic uncertainty. I'm strongly in favor of all arguments that let me remove sources of uncertainty from my mental model, since enough stuff I'm uncertain about always remains.