Maybe in the context of the book it is a major reason.
Strings are ubiquitous to programming. I'd argue that it's even more for first time programmers. Zed wanted something that would be easy to use.
(ASCII) Strings formatting is more important to beginners than unicode support, new style classes by default, iterators in range()/enumerate()/etc. , the new division operator, etc.
I haven't recommended his book to beginners because it was stuck in Python 2. But I have to agree that Python 2 had some stuff that was more "newbie-friendly" than Python 3
Strings are ubiquitous to programming. I'd argue that it's even more for first time programmers. Zed wanted something that would be easy to use.
(ASCII) Strings formatting is more important to beginners than unicode support, new style classes by default, iterators in range()/enumerate()/etc. , the new division operator, etc.
I haven't recommended his book to beginners because it was stuck in Python 2. But I have to agree that Python 2 had some stuff that was more "newbie-friendly" than Python 3