[gcr]

Does this get easier or harder in python 3?

I like the explicit separation that Racket has between "here is a buffer of binary data" and "here is a sequence of Unicode characters," and (looking on the outside without working with it), I'm glad that Python 3 began to adopt some of that.

[rspeer]

smnrchrds's case of fixing someone else's ASCII assumption gets easier, because the code probably would not have been written that way.

In Python 2, it's really easy to write code that confuses bytes and characters, which introduces bugs and crashes when non-ASCII characters show up.

In Python 3, they made it easier to work with Unicode, because it's the default for everything, and much harder to confuse bytes and characters, because of that separation between the data types.