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> But to be honest Unicode in itself is probably the biggest SNAFU of our entire field. Explain. EDIT: Oh! I construed this as a negative sentiment about Unic

> But to be honest Unicode in itself is probably the biggest SNAFU of our entire field. Explain. EDIT: Oh! I construed this as a negative sentiment about Unicode, but perhaps it was just: "Yeah, it's complicated because language is complicated". Thanks, responders!

EnergyAmy 3y ago
It was always going to be messy to create something that covered all of the writing systems in the world, but things like this didn't help, and is probably what they're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
tialaramex 3y ago
I can't explain what the previous poster was thinking, but Unicode is frustrating to work with. The problem is, that frustration just replicates the reality of the human writing systems Unicode captures. Nobody invented weird nonsense to make your life harder in Unicode, millions of humans developed a variety of weird nonsense to make their lives easier, over thousands of years and Unicode captures most of it. Case for example, why the heck would there be exactly two versions of A, one of which usually only appears at the start of words, and not always? Other people's squiggles don't do that, but notably several European writing systems (Latin and Cyrillic) do. People who use those systems think ABCDE and abcde are somehow "similar" even though they don't seem very similar at all. Then they're surprised other people don't do that.
- overboard2 3y ago
  Not every human writing system has to be expressible in all contexts.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Popular languages on computers should generally work, though.
- morelisp 3y ago
  > Nobody invented weird nonsense to make your life harder in Unicode The current state of emoji, unfortunately, makes this no longer true. (That being said, it's also designed in a way that's mostly ignorable if you don't need it. But only mostly.)
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I don’t think that pictograms are weird nonsense. Symbology always had an important part in human history, and where else would you put it?
    - morelisp 3y ago
      A markup language, or named entities, some length-prefixed blob, just generally something that doesn't require making UAX 29 more difficult. I understand why emoji is as complicated as it is. I don't think it was a good idea to bake that complication into Unicode.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Emoji is not an additional complexity, it builds on top of the same primitives like Chinese characters and whatnot. Unless you claim supporting non-european languages is unnecessary, then emojis are a perfectly good “making use of” of unused regions.
        morelisp 3y ago
        > Emoji... builds on top of the same primitives like Chinese characters It does not, and if you think it does it's obvious you didn't read UAX 29. GB11 is the most complex rule and only applies to emoji (well, and other Extended_Pictographics if you don't want to call the legacy pictographics emoji, but no Chinese).
cryptonector 3y ago
Exactly, there's nothing really wrong with Unicode -- it's complicated, yes, but only because human scripts are.

EnergyAmy 3y ago

It was always going to be messy to create something that covered all of the writing systems in the world, but things like this didn't help, and is probably what they're referring to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

tialaramex 3y ago

I can't explain what the previous poster was thinking, but Unicode is frustrating to work with. The problem is, that frustration just replicates the reality of the human writing systems Unicode captures. Nobody invented weird nonsense to make your life harder in Unicode, millions of humans developed a variety of weird nonsense to make their lives easier, over thousands of years and Unicode captures most of it. Case for example, why the heck would there be exactly two versions of A, one of which usually only appears at the start of words, and not always? Other people's squiggles don't do that, but notably several European writing systems (Latin and Cyrillic) do. People who use those systems think ABCDE and abcde are somehow "similar" even though they don't seem very similar at all. Then they're surprised other people don't do that.

overboard2 3y ago
Not every human writing system has to be expressible in all contexts.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Popular languages on computers should generally work, though.
morelisp 3y ago
> Nobody invented weird nonsense to make your life harder in Unicode The current state of emoji, unfortunately, makes this no longer true. (That being said, it's also designed in a way that's mostly ignorable if you don't need it. But only mostly.)
- kaba0 3y ago
  I don’t think that pictograms are weird nonsense. Symbology always had an important part in human history, and where else would you put it?
  - morelisp 3y ago
    A markup language, or named entities, some length-prefixed blob, just generally something that doesn't require making UAX 29 more difficult. I understand why emoji is as complicated as it is. I don't think it was a good idea to bake that complication into Unicode.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Emoji is not an additional complexity, it builds on top of the same primitives like Chinese characters and whatnot. Unless you claim supporting non-european languages is unnecessary, then emojis are a perfectly good “making use of” of unused regions.
      - morelisp 3y ago
        > Emoji... builds on top of the same primitives like Chinese characters It does not, and if you think it does it's obvious you didn't read UAX 29. GB11 is the most complex rule and only applies to emoji (well, and other Extended_Pictographics if you don't want to call the legacy pictographics emoji, but no Chinese).

cryptonector 3y ago

Exactly, there's nothing really wrong with Unicode -- it's complicated, yes, but only because human scripts are.