The main problem is that most programmers never experience Unicode problems themselves. 7 bits is enough for most of us. So we only start using Unicode when the

The main problem is that most programmers never experience Unicode problems themselves. 7 bits is enough for most of us. So we only start using Unicode when the pain caused by incessant nagging exceeds the pain of implementing Unicode. So we never fix the Unicode problems out of curiosity, we fix them because people make us. No wonder we never learn. The second problem is that we don't understand Unicode. Yes, we know that 7 bits isn't quite enough to represent all different characters, and that you have utf-8 and UTC, and so forth, but we really don't care enought to find out how it really works. We read some articles online, and we start using wchar_t / TCHAR instead of char, but that's basically it. Why bother with Unicode when you can simply write 'resume' instead of 'résumé'? Nobody cares. That's what it boils down to: Nobody really cares. So it doesn't get fixed. The only mystery is why people still expect Unicode support to "just happen".