[jammycakes]

Yes, but it's not the default and it does require special considerations. This means that code written by inexperienced developers (or even more experienced developers who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of Unicode and internationalisation etc) will be more likely to behave incorrectly when presented with anything in a foreign language.

[zo1]

If they have difficulty grasping those concepts, then they shouldn't be working with them. They should rather stick to plain ascii/latin-1 and leave the fancy things to people that know what they're doing. Python3 in this case wouldn't be a silver bullet to make them magically work with unicode better.

[jammycakes]

Nobody should be sticking to plain ascii/latin-1, and certainly not inexperienced developers. The only valid reason for using anything other than UTF-8 these days is that you are interacting with a legacy system that doesn't support it.

Unicode isn't a "fancy thing" that is best left to "people that know what they're doing." It's the difference between displaying a name such as Siån correctly and as a bunch of hieroglyphics.

Besides, even for experienced developers who know what they're doing, if you're imposing any form of ceremony or special considerations around using Unicode, you're increasing the risk of bugs and mistakes.

That's why I say Unicode should be made the default. It's legacy encodings such as Latin-1 that should be treated on a need-to-know basis.

[burntsushi]

This is precisely what I would consider a minor improvement.

[jammycakes]

No, defaults are important. It's the difference between "doing the right thing by default" and "doing the wrong thing by default."

Unicode may be of little relevance to some disciplines, such as scientific computing for example, but in others, such as modern web development, it is a deal breaker.

[burntsushi]

I don't need to be told that proper handling of Unicode is important. I know it's important.

I also don't need to be told that defaults are important. I know they're important.

But it is still a minor improvement under the scope of a ~6 year migration that has been absolute hell to everyone involved. Under any other circumstance, I'd be right there with you saying It's A Really Good Thing, but if we have to pay this high of a cost for it, then the improvement here looks pretty meh to me.

If you want to insist on evaluating this on some absolute scale irrespective of its cost, then I don't want anything to do with that.

Finally, one might argue that whether this is actually minor or not is irrelevant. What's relevant is that a boatload of people perceive the delta between Python 2 and Python 3 to be incredibly small, and yet, the amount of work to migrate is dauntingly large. There's a discrepancy there regardless of whether you disagree with others' valuations of the improvements in Python 3.