The Python Unicode Mess
As far as I can tell this is a long-form “I used to be able to ignore encoding issues and now it’s a ‘mess’ because the language is forcing me to be correct”. Each of the examples cited is something which was a source of latent bugs which he thought was working because they were ignored.<p>Only his third bit of advice isn’t wrong and treating it as something unusual shows the problem: the only safe way to handle text has always been to decode bytes as soon as you get them, work with Unicode, and then encode it when you send them out. Anything else is extremely hard to get right, even if many English-native programmers were used to being able to delay learning why for long periods of time.