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> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to en

> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.
- RobertRoberts 5y ago
  But what if ASCII is completely sufficient for all the customers I work with? This is where the accusation crosses into unreasonable for me.
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  > The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Could there also be bias in the statement "ASCII is not good enough."?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I wouldn't call it bias. You can make a claim "I know my use-cases so well that I can guarantee that ASCII will cover it". I'd call that foolishness, not bias.
silvestrov 5y ago
Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching. Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word. Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing. Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.
- RobertRoberts 5y ago
  But how is it a personal bias if I never run into these technical issues to deal with in the first place?
  - silvestrov 5y ago
    You have never sorted any texts? Never made a list of names? Never implemented a search function? These aspects can easily creep into an app without you even noticing. Saying "I haven't seem them" is not proof for them not being there. E.g. web servers had some surprise security bugs because they didn't think about overly long utf-8 codes.
    - hashmush 5y ago
      The default Android keyboard (Google keyboard) had/has an issue like this. It really likes to auto-complete a to å and ä even though the keys are at opposite ends of the (Swedish) keyboard. If I wanted to write "här" (here) instead of "har" (have/has) I would've used ä...
    - RobertRoberts 5y ago
      I have done all of those things. But my customers simply were not affected negatively by the technical choices I made. (and I have great relationships and very open communication with the people I've served) I implemented single fields for personal names, single textareas for addresses and some very basic content format selections and collation and my simple solutions have solved _all_ of my customers needs in these areas. It seems to be some bizarre assumption that _everyone_ has a bad experience because some code wasn't done they way they would do it. It's absurd to be accused of something that has simply not been a problem for my users.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.

RobertRoberts 5y ago
But what if ASCII is completely sufficient for all the customers I work with? This is where the accusation crosses into unreasonable for me.
CoastalCoder 5y ago
> The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Could there also be bias in the statement "ASCII is not good enough."?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I wouldn't call it bias. You can make a claim "I know my use-cases so well that I can guarantee that ASCII will cover it". I'd call that foolishness, not bias.

silvestrov 5y ago

Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching. Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word. Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing. Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.

RobertRoberts 5y ago
But how is it a personal bias if I never run into these technical issues to deal with in the first place?
- silvestrov 5y ago
  You have never sorted any texts? Never made a list of names? Never implemented a search function? These aspects can easily creep into an app without you even noticing. Saying "I haven't seem them" is not proof for them not being there. E.g. web servers had some surprise security bugs because they didn't think about overly long utf-8 codes.
  - hashmush 5y ago
    The default Android keyboard (Google keyboard) had/has an issue like this. It really likes to auto-complete a to å and ä even though the keys are at opposite ends of the (Swedish) keyboard. If I wanted to write "här" (here) instead of "har" (have/has) I would've used ä...
  - RobertRoberts 5y ago
    I have done all of those things. But my customers simply were not affected negatively by the technical choices I made. (and I have great relationships and very open communication with the people I've served) I implemented single fields for personal names, single textareas for addresses and some very basic content format selections and collation and my simple solutions have solved _all_ of my customers needs in these areas. It seems to be some bizarre assumption that _everyone_ has a bad experience because some code wasn't done they way they would do it. It's absurd to be accused of something that has simply not been a problem for my users.