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The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their state

The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places. Not saying I agree with their statement though because even in 2015 it was obvious Unicode was here to stay. But I can at least understand their sentiment. If that were written now I’d wager it would say Unicode rather than ASCII. Or at least I’d really hope it would.

zero_shift 5y ago
I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  “Universal” has two meaning here: 1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not 2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well. I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back. What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice. Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.
RobertMiller 5y ago
> The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  I know 2015 wasn’t that long ago (I’m pretty old too :) ) but it wasn’t that long ago when language support for Unicode was patchy (Go is only 12 years old and it was a big thing that supporting Unicode out of the box). Even as late as 2015 some popular desktop applications either didn’t support Unicode or didn’t default to it. MySQL only supported utf8mb4 in 2010 and it took a few years for that version to become wide spread. Plenty of servers I managed back then didn’t even have Unicode locales installed. To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern. My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.

zero_shift 5y ago

I disagree. Even in 2015, pretending ASCII was a workable universal format involved either pretending non-occidental languages didn't exist, or, as I darkly suspect is the case with many US-based computer scientists, forgetting their existence entirely.

hnlmorg 5y ago
“Universal” has two meaning here: 1. Works with everyone’s language. Which ASCII does not 2. Works on pretty much every machine. Which ASCII does very well. I’m not defending the use of pure ASCII but if you’re concern is that the text is rendered universally then ASCII wasn’t the worst suggestion a few years back. What you’re arguing is a different requirement and that’s support for peoples languages. If that’s a concern then ASCII isn’t the right choice. Those two requirements are not mutually inclusive.

RobertMiller 5y ago

> The age of the article should be taken into consideration here because back then Unicode support was still patchy in places If the article had been written 20 years before it actually was, maybe. You're making me feel old here, 2015 really was not very long ago and little of relevance to this discussion has changed between then and now.

hnlmorg 5y ago
I know 2015 wasn’t that long ago (I’m pretty old too :) ) but it wasn’t that long ago when language support for Unicode was patchy (Go is only 12 years old and it was a big thing that supporting Unicode out of the box). Even as late as 2015 some popular desktop applications either didn’t support Unicode or didn’t default to it. MySQL only supported utf8mb4 in 2010 and it took a few years for that version to become wide spread. Plenty of servers I managed back then didn’t even have Unicode locales installed. To be clear, even in 2015 _I_ personally would have recommended Unicode (like yourself) because it was clear that it was, and is, the future. But I can forgive some people for being cautious about it even as late as 2015 if universal comparability was their concern. My point is, if you’re only targeting English speakers _and_ you’re primary concern is portability then ASCII isn’t wasn’t unreasonable recommendation.