I had a colleague who was hostile to any language other than common lisp. Except python, which I assume is just because this page exists. What if norvig woke up that day and decided to write about Ruby instead?

Have you considered reducing review noise by using static analysis?

encode()/decode() have used UTF-8 as the default since Python 3.2 (soon, 15 years ago). This is about the default encoding for e.g. the "encoding" parameter of open().

You mean the coding= comment? Where are you shipping your code that that was actually a problem? I've never been on a project where we did that, let alone needed it.