I find surreal how much people underestimate how big is the population that deals with those unicodeerrors. It's SO MANY FUCKING LANGUAGES AND SO MANY PEOPLE. The majority of the world population writes using non-ASCII characters!
It's a HUGE problem in Python 2. Python 3 was needed. If you don't think the Unicode change was needed and you actually work with texts in any form, you should also stop developing "for web scale" before fixing this. Because you're actually focusing on a small percentage of the world population on your software.
For me Zed's argument sounds like "This is America, speak English". Specially with his quotes around "international".
His argument should rather be written like "This is America, you are not allowed even to write your last name normally" - then it sounds stupid/irrational/funny enough.
which seems to be the case in switzerland: If you want to apply for swiss citizenship, your name needs to be compatible with ISO-8859-15 because the central registry does not support unicode: https://www.dasmagazin.ch/2016/09/02/ic-bin-kein-schweizer/ (sorry, german only, which seems oddly apt)
It's a HUGE problem in Python 2. Python 3 was needed. If you don't think the Unicode change was needed and you actually work with texts in any form, you should also stop developing "for web scale" before fixing this. Because you're actually focusing on a small percentage of the world population on your software.
For me Zed's argument sounds like "This is America, speak English". Specially with his quotes around "international".