[slownews45]

The level on intentional compatibility breaking was crazy.

The fact that they went out of their way to break python 2 unicode when running on python 3 was just totally nuts. Especially after making such a big deal about unicode!

I've never seen anything like it I don't think? Maybe the new Perl that never really landed?

[raiph]

> The fact that they went out of their way to break python 2 unicode when running on python 3 was just totally nuts. Especially after making such a big deal about unicode!

Imo it's infinitely worse than that.

The big deal about Unicode is its nature, as defined in the "Summary Narrative" from 1991[0]. To wit:

> The Unicode character encoding derives its name from three main goals:

* universal (addressing the needs of world languages)

* uniform (fixed-width codes for efficient access), and

* unique (bit sequence has only one interpretation into character codes)

The Unicode folk realized that it would take decades to shift developers worldwide to doing that properly, so they adopted a three stage plan for software (eg the string types of programming languages) to get from where things were, to where they needed to be:

* Stage #1: Character = byte

* Stage #2: Character = code point

* Stage #3: Character = what a user thinks of as a character[1]

Python 1 was a Stage #1 language -- Character = byte -- like most others of its time.

In Python 2 there were tweaks to try move toward Stage #2 -- Character = code point, again, like most other PLs of its time.

In Python 3, they dictated a full switch to Stage #2 --- Character = code point. That was an unnecessarily painful break relative to Python 2. But -- and this is what really matters -- they entirely ignored Stage #3, which is the whole point of Unicode in the final analysis.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html

[1] https://unicode.org/glossary/#grapheme

[erik_seaberg]

They’re still working on Raku, it just isn’t branded “Perl 6” anymore.

[lizmat]

That "new" Perl landed in 2015 as "Perl 6". It has been renamed to The Raku Programming Language in 2019 (https://raku.org #rakulang).

[int_19h]

Well, there were good reasons to change the way py2 worked with Unicode, and I don't think this could have been made right without severe breakage either way. The only thing that should have happened sooner is support for u"" literals.

[slownews45]

I had developed with unicode in mind using u"".

For some reason this was not good enough for the python 3 folks - they actively broke this code which was from folks who had SPECIFICALLy addressed unicode in their apps.

And yes, they could have supported u"" (and a number of other things).

They went - unicode is so critical we will break the world, and then for folks who had already supported unicode well or wanted to dual target a library they said your u"" approach to unicode is so bad we will break it.

Total BS in my book.