> and were smug about it I feel like a lot of the people who had this reaction were reacting to being told (correctly) that how they handled strings was broken

> and were smug about it I feel like a lot of the people who had this reaction were reacting to being told (correctly) that how they handled strings was broken. A big reason that projects had difficulty upgrading, especially difficulty using the automatic 2->3 upgrade tooling, was because of broken handling of unicode and broken handling of binary strings. I remember reading a quick assessment of a large open-source project that there were thousands of calls to a single string-handling function that would each need to be inspected by hand to determine whether it was correct usage that would be correctly translated by the 2->3 converter or buggy usage that needed to be fixed before running the 2->3 converter, with some people guessing a 50/50 split. The effort was going to be gargantuan, and though the ultimate cause and responsibility was poor design choices in Python 2, the immediate cause was that the code was wrong, and some people didn't appreciate hearing that. No one really blamed programmers for getting strings wrong in Python 2. It was unreasonably hard and extremely rare for people to get it right, so there was not really any shame in Python 2 programs and libraries being pervasively broken in that way. But some people still felt it was smug and condescending to make reference to this elephant in the room. This put the Python maintainers in a bad position, because they were trying to explain the benefits of upgrading and also the costs and difficulties, both of which were intimately tied to the brokenness of current codebases. As a user and spectator to the whole drama, therefore, I felt that some maintainers got overly defensive about issues that virtually every codebase suffered from. And some of them took a "so what" attitude towards bugs involving non-Western languages, saying that if they personally didn't care whether their code handled Chinese or Bengali filenames then it wasn't a bug to do random things with them, which sounded just as bad ten years ago as it does now.