As a non-native English programmer, I disagree. I love ASCII despite it lacking many characters from my own language. Sometimes Instead of the Ç I expect, I'll

As a non-native English programmer, I disagree. I love ASCII despite it lacking many characters from my own language. Sometimes Instead of the Ç I expect, I'll get a Chinese character. What do you do then? Well you switch to an ASCII-only mode and debug the encoding by looking at the bytes. You go one level of abstraction lower than the unicode. The ability to do that is precious. > If your app has no issues rendering हैकर न्यूज़ (Hacker News), then it should have no issues rendering Emoji First, that's not true. Many fonts have partial support or an app may have an issue with displaying mutli-colored glyphs. There are many possibilities for this partial failure. > then the problem is your app and not Unicode. Yes. Precisely. I don't think unicode or emojis are problematic per se. But they belong to a higher layer than the one a lot of (non-web) programmers spend their times in. Unicode support is HARD. ASCII support is easy. Making ASCII tools is easy and promises an ecosystem full of useful tools. > This is one reason I prefer using GUI applications over CLI applications: Unicode support is terrible across terminals and CLI apps, while most of the commonly used GUI frameworks are okay. And that's fine, but realize that by doing so, you depend on a layer that relies on an ASCII layer. Tools that require unicode can't be used there.