[saurik]

More of that effort needs to go into compromises back to Python 2.x as opposed to figuring out how to beat people into going up to Python 3.x; it should not have taken until Python 3.3, for example, for the u'' syntax to return. They need to sprinkle a few well-placed "this is a way to get compatibility with Python 2 and 3 at the same time, without crazy tools, at least as an interim state". When I shifted from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9, there was nowhere near as much of a flag day of pain, even though they were attempting to solve the same overall problem (Unicode), and even though Ruby 1.8 was actually abysmal at Unicode (unlike Python 2, which contrary to many of the people who like to try to carrot people to Python 3, does not have any issues with Unicode; in fact, if anything, Python 2.x is better than Python 3.0 was, as Python 3 decided to "fix" a bunch of things, like filename encodings, which actually should not be assumed to have an encoding :/).

[bemused]

my experience with python3 unicode has been just the other way round - there are some minor troubles with python3 in regard to unicode too, but when doing anything user facing (starting with i18n/l10n) I'd take python3 without thinking twice. its 2015 and bugs like the unicode usernames problem in GTA V lately are just embarrassing for developers

I'm not saying you can't do this with python2 but you have to pay attention to unicode all the time. this gets worse A LOT when trying to serve python 2 and 3 from the same codebase, something I wouldn't recommend at all if you want to do eg. application development. of course this is a bit frustrating if you learned to properly do unicode in python2 the hard way, but for new developers not having to worry about unicode issues really is a blessing