Something tells me you did not experience the pre-unicode world around 90s. I did, and I didn&#x27;t like it. I prefer it is abstracted from me thankyouverymuch.<p>But seriously, all what python (and as a matter of the fact majority of languages) is placing a clear distinction between a byte and a character. This forces developers to keep in mind what they are dealing with and reduces number of bugs.<p>The truth is that if you treat everything as bytes, chances are that your program has bugs. Actually good test is to convert your existing Py2 code to Py3, if you have encoding&#x2F;decoding errors then your code was buggy.