> The operations that make sense with character strings would also make sense with bytes when an encoding is specified. Therefore, there should just be a way of annotating bytes with a suggested encoding.
That's the ruby solution. I like the ruby API here. When ruby introduced it in 1.9, it did cause similar upgrade pain, since you weren't used to having your strings tagged with an encoding, and suddenly they all kind of need to be if you want to do anything with them as strings-not-bytes.
As someone else noted would be the result, indeed the result was lots of "incompatible encoding" exceptions.
I think ruby actually has a pretty reasonable API here, but several years on, there are still _plenty_ of developers who don't understand it.
Sure, there are growing pains with any breaking change. Do you think the ruby 1.8 -> 1.9 transition went more smoothly than the python 2.7 -> 3.x... transition?
But on the other hand, Python's overall popularity has grown (mostly on the back of 'data science' I think), while rubies has shrunk, and python is definitely more popular than ruby at the moment... so python's lesser success at that transition didn't actually matter much in the end?
That's the ruby solution. I like the ruby API here. When ruby introduced it in 1.9, it did cause similar upgrade pain, since you weren't used to having your strings tagged with an encoding, and suddenly they all kind of need to be if you want to do anything with them as strings-not-bytes.
As someone else noted would be the result, indeed the result was lots of "incompatible encoding" exceptions.
I think ruby actually has a pretty reasonable API here, but several years on, there are still _plenty_ of developers who don't understand it.