Having written a bunch of Python 2 and porting it to 3 where I deal with unknown encodings (FTP servers), I can't help but disagree with Armin on most of his Py

Having written a bunch of Python 2 and porting it to 3 where I deal with unknown encodings (FTP servers), I can't help but disagree with Armin on most of his Python 3 posts. The crux of his argument with this article is "unix is bytes, you are making me deal with pain to treat it like Unicode." Python 2 just allowed to take crap in and spit crap out. Python 3 requires you to do something more complicated when crap comes in. In my situation, I am regularly putting data into a database (PostgreSQL with UTF-8 encoding) or working with Sublime Text (on all three platforms). You try to pass crap along to those and they explode. You HAVE to deal with crappy input. In my experience, Python 2 explodes at run time when you get weird crappily-encoded data. And only your end users see it, and it is a huge pain to reproduce and handle. Python 3 forces you to write code that can handle the decoding at the get go. By porting my Python 2 to 3, I uncovered a bunch of places where I was just passing the buck on encoding issues. Python 3 forced me to address the issues. I'm sure there are bugs and annoyances along the way with Python 3. Oh well. Dealing with text input in any language is a pain. Having worked with Python, C, Ruby and PHP and dealing with properly handling "input" for things like FTP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP, etc, yeah, it sucks. Transliterating, converting between encodings, wide chars, Windows APIs. Fun stuff. It isn't really Python 3 that is the problem, it is undefined input. Unfortunately, it seems Armin happens to play in areas where people play fast and loose (or are completely oblivious to encodings). There is probably more pain generally there than dealing with transporting data from native UI widgets to databases. Sorry dude. Anyway, I never write Python 2 anymore because I hate having this randomly explode for end-users and having to try and trace down the path of text through thousands of lines of code. Python 3 makes it easy for me because I can't just pass bytes along as if they were Unicode, I have to deal with crappy input and ask the user what to do. Python 2 is a dead end with all sorts of issues. The SSL support in Python 2 is a joke compared to 3. You can't re-use SSL contexts without installing the cryptography package, which requires, cffi, pycparsers and bunch of other crap. Python 2 SSL verification didn't exist unless you roll your own, or use Requests. Except Requests didn't even support HTTPS proxies until less than a year ago. Good riddance Python 2.