The problem with strings is that there is very little that is easy. The lesson is to avoid using strings as much as possible, although sadly fashions in program

The problem with strings is that there is very little that is easy. The lesson is to avoid using strings as much as possible, although sadly fashions in programming seem to have been heading in the other direction for a long time. I don't think hiding difficult operations behind an easy facade that sometimes breaks is a good idea. It makes people think that working with strings is easy. It results in lots of people writing broken or even insecure code[1]. The idea that you only have to deal with unicode strings if you are writing an i18n'd app is wrong. File names are unicode. The content of the pasteboard is unicode. The results of calling a web API are unicode. Text the user types into a text field is unicode. Unless your app doesn't handle outside text data at all then it's going to encounter non-ascii text. And if you aren't handling text from outside the app then you probably won't have much need for string operations anyway. [1] do a github search for 'UTF8String' and 'length' to see how much code using NSString is passing the wrong length value into C apis.