I've found that it matters pretty quickly. I've seen the Python conversion error alluded to in the article quite frequently, and if you search for it you'll fi

I've found that it matters pretty quickly. I've seen the Python conversion error alluded to in the article quite frequently, and if you search for it you'll find no shortage of people asking about it. Most programs have to deal with non-ASCII now. Even if your target audience and users are all English-speaking Americans, people are getting used to things like emdashes and smart quotes, and it's pretty bush league if your program doesn't support them or displays them incorrectly. The number of programmers who can just blithely ignore Unicode is dwindling by the day.