Quoting: "Look, I know it is easy for me to armchair quarterback and critique with the benefit of hindsight/ignorance. I'm sure there is a lot of nuance here. I'm sure there was disagreement within the Python community over a lot of these issues"

Actually there was too little pushback early on. People generally didn't really anticipate this. We can safely conclude the language developers didn't anticipate it fully, otherwise they wouldn't have bet on 2to3.

C++17 tries to treat filenames as opaque "bytes" - en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesyst… and C++20 is learning from mistakes: en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesyst… has been deprecated...

"a mass insertion of b'' prefixes everywhere was not desirable, as that would require developers to think about whether a type was a bytes or str, " basically they reject explicit over implicit. why is hg in Python and not Perl ?

The number of projects I have seen where one section does 10x as much as they have to so that the other sections can avoid a minor inconvenience blows my mind. It's why our industry is so backwards.

Another "sentry for testsuites" pic.twitter.com/TqZw2DlfUG

When I ever decide to switch from Classic Python 2.5 over to the current Python 3.x, I'll just treat it as though I'm moving to a new language.

Well, it is 2020. It has been 12 years. If they have been trying to port code for so long, and still haven't managed, I wouldn't blame the language. 12 years is enough time to rewrite it from scratch if you have to.

Complaining about having to specify explicitly the b-strings? Explicit is better than implicit, and that means the programmer has to have a reason to use a b-string, while allowing 99% of all projects to be utf compatible and make their lives easier.