> I doubt that only 10% of people are dealing with unicode. Rough estimate 10% of the world speak English as a first language and almost all other languages are

> I doubt that only 10% of people are dealing with unicode. Rough estimate 10% of the world speak English as a first language and almost all other languages are written with (at least some) non-ascii characters. I believe he meant people that have to actually deal with complications of unicode/bytestring themselves. For most uses, you just handle "strings", and don't really care if they're unicode or not. Only lower-level libraries/apps will ever care if these strings are unicode or not.