Python had a horrible story for international text before this.
No, Python had a horrible story for text, and people who worked in limited/sheltered domains didn't realize it. I personally lost all kinds of valuable hours of my life fighting with Python 2's "pretend everything is ASCII until it isn't, then fall over dead" model, because I -- a US citizen, working at US companies, and for quite a while dealing only with English-language content -- still ran into non-ASCII characters with regularity.
And here I'm being charitable; I simply refuse to believe that the overwhelming majority of people who used Python 2 never once had to deal with someone copy/pasting text out of Word or another program that used "smart quotes".
No, Python had a horrible story for text, and people who worked in limited/sheltered domains didn't realize it. I personally lost all kinds of valuable hours of my life fighting with Python 2's "pretend everything is ASCII until it isn't, then fall over dead" model, because I -- a US citizen, working at US companies, and for quite a while dealing only with English-language content -- still ran into non-ASCII characters with regularity.
And here I'm being charitable; I simply refuse to believe that the overwhelming majority of people who used Python 2 never once had to deal with someone copy/pasting text out of Word or another program that used "smart quotes".