Yes that's what I said, and there's nothing "wrong" with it, I just think that it's where most of the confusion comes from, as many people that come from Python

Yes that's what I said, and there's nothing "wrong" with it, I just think that it's where most of the confusion comes from, as many people that come from Python 2 think of `str` as a byte-string, while in Python 3 it's a Unicode string. I think the "unicode-by-default" approach of Python 3 is a great reason to switch to it (and I did so for almost all my codebases), converting code can sometimes cause surprises though, especially due to the lack of type checks in Python combined with the more stricter checking that Python 3 does when working with strings (i.e. adding Unicode and byte strings throws an exception in Python 3, whereas Python 2 would simply try to convert the byte-string implicitly into a string and only throw an exception if this fails). All theses changes combined make converting code from 2 to 3 more risky. I think especially the handling of type coercion between Unicode and bytes objects could have been handled differently, as it is (IMO) a big semantic change. As an example, just today I ran into a problem with WTForms and Flask (which is a great framework btw, thanks for writing it!), where I used a cookie-based session store provided by `itsdangerous`, which deserializes a value stored in the session either into a byte-string or a Unicode string. After switching my code from Python 2 to Python 3, there were still some clients in the wild that had a session object in their cookie generated by Python 2 containing byte-strings, and `itsdangerous` happily deserialized it into a byte-string as well, causing an exception when my Python 3 code tried adding it to a Unicode string. With new sessions this didn't happen of course (as the objects were serialized as Unicode), which made this thing quite fun to debug. Granted, this is not a problem with Unicode in Python 3, but I think it illustrates the kind of challenges you face when migrating codebases from one to the other. What I can agree on is that we'd be much better off if everyone was using Python 3, and eventually we'll get there.