You fail to understand that they purposely broke compatibility for no benefit. That is not improving the language - that is being stupid. In python 2 you could

You fail to understand that they purposely broke compatibility for no benefit. That is not improving the language - that is being stupid. In python 2 you could specify a unicode literal with u''. So a natural evolutionary option if you had a unicode addiction and wanted python 3 to be unicode native, would be to treat u'' as unicode literals in python 3 as well. This let's the code run under python 2 still, and then you get unicode in 3. And if you are 3 only, just "blah blah" works as well - nice. But they didn't do that. They purposely took u'' out to make it hard to support 2 and 3. That is absolute stupidity. In other words, they BROKE compatibility for no benefit - but just to break it. They did the same thing with byte handling, jumped the io abstraction in - these things all destroyed performance and use cases.