Report from the Python Language Summit

I'll just tell all the existing systems out there to use UTF-8, even if they don't. I'm sure I can find a way to jam all of Unicode onto the Adafruit-based display board my Python code is talking to: it has a whole 64K of flash and 2K of RAM! I'm sure I can fit glyphs for all of Unicode in there and still have space for everything else it has to do!

No, not everything can use UTF-8, even in an ideal world. And such systems will *always* use different encodings, so to talk to such systems Python's enforced conversion is extremely valuable. And even when you're not, and the system you are talking to uses UTF-8 or some other Unicode variant, the enforced conversion is *still* valuable because it forces you to think about what encoding is in use, and amazingly often it's not straight UTF-8, or it's UTF-8 with extra requirements such as needing to be canonicalized or decanonicalized in a particular way or "oops we didn't say but experimentation makes it clear that $strange_canonicalization is the only way to go". (I have seen all of these on real systems, along with people claiming UTF-8 but meaning UCS-16 because they didn't know there was a difference, and vice versa -- and, in the latter cases, cursed them.)