Science Quote by Guido van Rossum

“Modern programs must handle Unicode” reads less like a tip and more like a quiet ultimatum: if your software can’t represent the world’s languages, names, and symbols accurately, it’s not “modern” in any meaningful sense. Guido van Rossum isn’t romanticizing globalization here; he’s pointing at an engineering reality that too many developers once treated as optional. Unicode is the difference between a product that works for your immediate peer group and one that survives contact with actual users.

The subtext is a critique of the old default: ASCII-centric thinking, where English wins by inertia and everyone else gets mojibake, broken search, corrupted databases, and “Sorry, your name is invalid” forms. By framing Unicode as a must, van Rossum aligns Python with a kind of pragmatic inclusivity: not a moral posture, but a specification with consequences. Your choices about text encoding aren’t neutral; they decide who gets legibility.

“Python has excellent support for Unicode, and will keep getting better” is also strategic positioning. It reassures developers that the language isn’t just powerful, it’s safe for the messy edges of real-world text. The “keep getting better” clause matters: Unicode isn’t a solved problem but a moving target (new scripts, new emoji, evolving normalization rules). Van Rossum is selling a long-term relationship between language design and cultural reality, and subtly warning that languages that treat text as bytes will keep paying interest on that technical debt.