Zed Shaw's rant
People have already lambasted Shaw's ignorance of why bytes and unicode need to be different underlying types. He mentioned a combined bytes/unicode object, but shows no understanding of why it came into existence. (Lazy scripters waste lots of cycles encoding and decoding the same string. By keeping the unicode and encoded versions together, python can recycle an existing objects instead of creating new ones.) I noticed Shaw did not mention the new style classes available in python3 that make multiple inheritance work. It is almost as if he has left multiple inheritance in the tool box because he never recognised the right times to use it.
Python devs believed fixing python2's defects with multiple inheritance and unicode properly were going to require changes that would be incompatible with the existing language. They created python3. Shaw did not create a language compatible with Python2 that fixed the inherent flaws.
After a huge tiresome rant about the need for backward compatibility, Shaw recommended deleting python's legacy string formatting mechanisms. I could not find the words to express what I thought about that, but someone has helpfully created a suitable web page here.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
