Personally I dislike how Python3 is infected with Unicode. It introduces quite some complexity (and probably inefficiency) when all you want to do is work with

Personally I dislike how Python3 is infected with Unicode. It introduces quite some complexity (and probably inefficiency) when all you want to do is work with bytes. Even if I am actually dealing with UTF-8, I should have a choice to treat it transparently, and basic logic says that it should be easier not harder than working on code point level. In particular what I dislike most is the complete removal of formatting on bytes (% and .format()). I also believe that dealing with unicode more transparently is a very reasonable strategy. There are not many places where you actually have to deal with code points. Text formatting and rendering is one of those few places. Having the file i/o and standard streams do encoding/decoding by default goes against that design.