2 ms·

Look, we’ve currently got about a million code points, and a trajectory and principles that should leave that easily enough for at least five thousand years, by

Look, we’ve currently got about a million code points, and a trajectory and principles that should leave that easily enough for at least five thousand years, by my simplistic estimate <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32286193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32286193>. There’s no point in forecasting that far in advance. And you’re concerning yourself with filling a space of two billion code points? A Unicode that would be in any danger of doing that would not be in the slightest bit recognisable as the Unicode of today. (Yeah, I know they once thought they could squeeze Unicode into 65,536 code points. I honestly don’t understand how they ever thought that would be sufficient even with Han unification, and I wish they hadn’t made that misstep that gave us the abomination that is UTF-16. But they knew running out was a hazard from the start, they just miscalculated the risk. No one that examines the matter is concerned about even the slightest risk of the current million code points being insufficient in the usefully-predictable future.)

WorldMaker 3y ago
I'm just saying it is better to make no assumptions here than to make the same mistakes that led to UTF-16's accidental brokenness. There are certainly jokes that emoji's current rate of expansion could be in the billions by the end of the decade. Every time we think we have a handle on "all" of human languages we make new interesting discoveries of past languages or hidden present languages or an indigenous populace declares a need for a script they can truly call their own rather than whatever ugly mix of Latin letters some missionaries thought appropriate in the cultural insensitive past or a populace has an uprising and declares a revolutionary new start or… That's just human languages. I'm sure we'd have a ton of problems if we ever started trying to encode non-human languages. I don't think we're in danger yet of discovering that dolphins have a written script for whale languages (or wilder some sort of first contact event with non-terrestial aliens), but our science fiction loves to posit such events happening at any time and as a huge surprise. It would be great if we were at least somewhat prepared for such wild hypotheticals. Yeah, that's outside the "usefully-predictable future", but also I think Unicode has always existed in a place where the future isn't "usefully-predictable". (How many 90s Unicode architects would have predicted emoji? As only one example.)

WorldMaker 3y ago

I'm just saying it is better to make no assumptions here than to make the same mistakes that led to UTF-16's accidental brokenness. There are certainly jokes that emoji's current rate of expansion could be in the billions by the end of the decade. Every time we think we have a handle on "all" of human languages we make new interesting discoveries of past languages or hidden present languages or an indigenous populace declares a need for a script they can truly call their own rather than whatever ugly mix of Latin letters some missionaries thought appropriate in the cultural insensitive past or a populace has an uprising and declares a revolutionary new start or… That's just human languages. I'm sure we'd have a ton of problems if we ever started trying to encode non-human languages. I don't think we're in danger yet of discovering that dolphins have a written script for whale languages (or wilder some sort of first contact event with non-terrestial aliens), but our science fiction loves to posit such events happening at any time and as a huge surprise. It would be great if we were at least somewhat prepared for such wild hypotheticals. Yeah, that's outside the "usefully-predictable future", but also I think Unicode has always existed in a place where the future isn't "usefully-predictable". (How many 90s Unicode architects would have predicted emoji? As only one example.)