Default text file encoding being platform-dependent always drove me nuts. This is a welcome change.

I also appreciate that they did not attempt to tackle filesystem encoding here, which is a separate issue that drives me nuts, but separately.

Not relying on flaky system defaults is a good thing. These things have a way of turning around and being different than what you assume them to be. A few years ago I was dealing with Ubuntu and some init.d scripts. One issue I ran into was that some script we used to launch Java (this was before docker) was running as root (bad, I know) and with a shell that did not set UTF-8 as the default like would be completely normal for regular users. And of course that revealed some bad APIs that we were using in Java that use the os default. Most of these things have variants that allow you to set the encoding at this point and a lot of static code checkers will warn you if you use the wrong one. But of course it only takes one place for this to start messing up content.

These days it's less of an issue but I would simply not rely on the os to get this right ever for this. Most uses of encodings other than UTF-8 are extremely likely to be unintentional at this point. And if it is intentional, you should be very explicit about it and not rely on weird indirect configuration through the OS that may or may not line up.

So, good change. Anything that breaks over this is probably better off with the simple fix added. And it's not worth leaving everything else as broken as it is with content corruption bugs just waiting to happen.

The following heuristic has become increasingly true over the last couple of decades: If you have some kind of "charset" configuration anywhere, and it's not UTF-8, it's wrong.

Python 2 was charset agnostic, so it always worked, but the improvement with Python 3 was not only an improvement – how to tell a Python 3 script from a Python 2 script?

* If it contains the string "utf-8", it's Python3.

* If it only works if your locale is C.UTF-8, it's Python3.

Needless to say, I welcome this change. The way I understand it, it would "repair" Python 3.

I thought it was default since python 3.

> And many other popular programming languages, including Node.js, Go, Rust, and Java uses UTF-8 by default.

Oh, I missed Java moving from UTF-16 to UTF-8.