4 ms·
> 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 2
by 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 agoI 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.