Filenames are a good example to show people why forcing an encoding onto all strings simply doesn't work.
The usual reaction from people is to ignore that and they'll shout: "fix your filenames!"
Here is another example:
Substrings of unicodestrings. Just split a unicodestring into chunks of 1024 bytes. Forcing an encoding here and allowing automatic conversions will be a mess. People will shout: "Your're splitting your Strings wrong!"
The first language I knew that fell for encoding aware strings was Delphi - people there called it "Frankenstrings" and meanwhile that language is pretty dead.
As a professional who has to handle a lot of different scenarios (barcodes, Edifact, Filenames, String-buffers, ...) - in the end you'll have to write all code using byte-strings. Then you'll have to write a lot of GUI-Libraries to be able to work with byte-strings... and in the end you'll be at the point where the old Python was... (In fact you'll never reach that point because just going elsewhere will be a lot easier)
Here is another example: Substrings of unicodestrings. Just split a unicodestring into chunks of 1024 bytes. Forcing an encoding here and allowing automatic conversions will be a mess. People will shout: "Your're splitting your Strings wrong!"
The first language I knew that fell for encoding aware strings was Delphi - people there called it "Frankenstrings" and meanwhile that language is pretty dead.
As a professional who has to handle a lot of different scenarios (barcodes, Edifact, Filenames, String-buffers, ...) - in the end you'll have to write all code using byte-strings. Then you'll have to write a lot of GUI-Libraries to be able to work with byte-strings... and in the end you'll be at the point where the old Python was... (In fact you'll never reach that point because just going elsewhere will be a lot easier)