6 ms·

It's really cool than these things can happen. Still, I can't help but feel like, in a couple of centuries, Unicode is gonna be a goddamn mess.

akiselev 10y ago
What isn't a huge goddamn mess after several centuries? If there's one thing we humans don't deal with well, it's entropy.
- js8 10y ago
  Actually, humans, just like any other living organism, deal with entropy quite well - they dump it onto others. :-)
  - copperx 10y ago
    Onto the next generation :/
- 1024core 10y ago
  The Pantheon in Rome.
ygra 10y ago
Heck, Unicode is a mess already. But that's mostly because (a) language and scripts are messy, and (b) the original aim was to unify and encompass all existing character sets, and some of those were messy as well. While there was considerable uproar over Emoji and there still often is over yet another fifteen symbols that everyone thinks no one would ever need or use, the bulk of the Unicode character set is still scripts for human languages. And some of those are only relevant for a very small minority, say, archaeologists. But that's fine. There's enough space, we're nowhere near to running out and Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  > Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds. Could you give an example? I don't know anything about this stuff.
  - dalke 10y ago
    Conversion between different character codes became much easier. (Å (U+00C5) is canonically the same as Å (U+212B) but the latter exist only for round-trip compatibility.) Unicode defines normalization algorithms (is é its own character, or e with a modifier character?). I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools.
    - vorg 10y ago
      > I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese English combines with top-down Chinese, and English combines with right-to-left Arabic, but top-down Chinese and right-to-left Arabic don't combine properly in the same document using Unicode -- the Arabic will be written bottom-up instead of top-down when embedded in the top-down Chinese.
      - dalke 10y ago
        Layout is indeed hard. I meant something simpler, like: The word 'computer' in English is 计算者 [jì suàn zhě] in Chinese, Компьютер in Russian, and حاسوب in Arabic." Try that without Unicode. It's of course possible with TeX, and no doubt other solutions. Which is why I added "and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools". (As a real-world use case, look at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" and see how he credits people using their full names, in their own written language.)
        Tyr42 10y ago
        Do you know when you would use 计算着 over 电脑[dian nao]? 计算着 I guess more literally translates to "one who computes", whereas 电脑 translates to "electric brain" which is a way more fun image, but I have no idea how the usage varies.

akiselev 10y ago

What isn't a huge goddamn mess after several centuries? If there's one thing we humans don't deal with well, it's entropy.

js8 10y ago
Actually, humans, just like any other living organism, deal with entropy quite well - they dump it onto others. :-)
- copperx 10y ago
  Onto the next generation :/
1024core 10y ago
The Pantheon in Rome.

ygra 10y ago

Heck, Unicode is a mess already. But that's mostly because (a) language and scripts are messy, and (b) the original aim was to unify and encompass all existing character sets, and some of those were messy as well. While there was considerable uproar over Emoji and there still often is over yet another fifteen symbols that everyone thinks no one would ever need or use, the bulk of the Unicode character set is still scripts for human languages. And some of those are only relevant for a very small minority, say, archaeologists. But that's fine. There's enough space, we're nowhere near to running out and Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds.

jessriedel 10y ago
> Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds. Could you give an example? I don't know anything about this stuff.
- dalke 10y ago
  Conversion between different character codes became much easier. (Å (U+00C5) is canonically the same as Å (U+212B) but the latter exist only for round-trip compatibility.) Unicode defines normalization algorithms (is é its own character, or e with a modifier character?). I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools.
  - vorg 10y ago
    > I can have a document which combines English, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese English combines with top-down Chinese, and English combines with right-to-left Arabic, but top-down Chinese and right-to-left Arabic don't combine properly in the same document using Unicode -- the Arabic will be written bottom-up instead of top-down when embedded in the top-down Chinese.
    - dalke 10y ago
      Layout is indeed hard. I meant something simpler, like: The word 'computer' in English is 计算者 [jì suàn zhě] in Chinese, Компьютер in Russian, and حاسوب in Arabic." Try that without Unicode. It's of course possible with TeX, and no doubt other solutions. Which is why I added "and expect it to be readable and editable by many different tools". (As a real-world use case, look at Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" and see how he credits people using their full names, in their own written language.)
      - Tyr42 10y ago
        Do you know when you would use 计算着 over 电脑[dian nao]? 计算着 I guess more literally translates to "one who computes", whereas 电脑 translates to "electric brain" which is a way more fun image, but I have no idea how the usage varies.