[mumblemumble]

I would guess that, if Python 3 hadn't addressed Unicode, Python would never have come to a place where so many people are worried about its performance.

Python's still a great language for the things it was being designed for back in the 2000s. But adding decent Unicode support is a big part of what helped it become an attractive language for use cases where I wish it performed better or had better support for parallelism. Natural language processing, for example.

[kgwgk]

Any other example? Because there are lots of high-performance computing tasks where unicode couldn't matter less.

[kec]

How do you square that assertion with the fact that people clung so hard to python 2 that it took the PSF 12 years to finally kill it?

[mumblemumble]

Some people clung hard to 2. Others flocked to 3.

In my direct experience, the only people who waited until the bitter end (and beyond) were ops folks who never had to stray much outside of 7-bit ASCII, and companies with large existing codebases that didn't want to allocate the resources to migrating. Neither of those really have much to do with my assertion that Python 3 attracted new people doing new things.