> Ruby strings are more powerful than Python strings as you can handle different encodings. In Python, you have to work around that with the bytes objects to ha

> Ruby strings are more powerful than Python strings as you can handle different encodings. In Python, you have to work around that with the bytes objects to handle non Unicode encodings. True, but that's another debate entirely. The counterpoint is that Python's stance makes it extremely powerful as a consumer of strings has a lot of guarantees about the string he's receiving, which is great for defensive programming.