4 ms·

Emoji by Year

23 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

SnooSux 3y ago
Interesting that some emoji going back to 2020 don't render on my desktop browser. The flags don't show up either (just the two-letter codes).
- aragonite 3y ago
  If you want the flags right now you can install this font: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags.html https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags.html
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Thank you :) Now I just need to figure out how to get 2023 emojis working in Windows 11.
smith7018 3y ago
I'm always impressed with how the Unicode Consortium decided to expand Emojis. It's cool to see that "head shaking horizontally" is just the smiling face + the left and right arrow unicodes or the new lime emoji is just the lemon and green square unicodes. Really smart and backwards compatible in a way.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > or the new lime emoji is just the lemon and green square unicodes They missed an opportunity to just base it on citrus hybridisation; eg a key lime is micrantha X citron!
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I didn't know how recent a lot of these were, or that unicode emojis were from 2010 for that matter.
aragonite 3y ago
As someone who greatly values the ability to (occasionally!) use emojis as/in identifiers in my personal-project code, I'll never understand why the Unicode Consortium chose to exclude emojis from the ID_START and ID_CONTINUE character classes [1] (in terms of which so many programming languages define their concept of a valid identifer). I'm not even sure the exclusion of emojis is consistent with their own explanation [2] of what an identifier should consist of, given that IMO an emoji pretty clearly qualifies as a 'ideograph' (a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept). It is reasonable to exclude non-representational characters like punctuations marks, dashes, parentheses, brackets, etc that intuitively don't 'stand for' anything and instead solely serve to delineate syntactic structure. But the vast majority of emojis are entirely unlike punctuations marks and do intuitively 'stand for' some idea or object. [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/ [2] "The formal syntax provided here captures the general intent that an identifier consists of a string of characters beginning with a letter or an ideograph, and followed by any number of letters, ideographs, digits, or underscores" (https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/#Default_Identifier_Syntax https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/#Default_Identifier_Syntax)
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  > I'll never understand why the Unicode Consortium chose to exclude emojis from the ID_START and ID_CONTINUE character classes [1] (in terms of which so many programming languages define their concept of a valid identifer). Emojis are essentially colored symbols in terms of Unicode general categories and many languages do not accept symbols in an identifier, so it's no surprise that emojis are handled equally. UTR #31 does have a profile for identifiers with emoji (see the section 7.2), but it also demonstrates why it can't be a default: there are cases where `AB` is not valid but `ABC` is valid for some characters A, B and C. So character classes can't fully describe identifiers with emoji after all! (And in fact, many Unicode character classes were defined only for describing standard algorithms.) You need a full emoji regular expression to define such identifiers. > [2] "The formal syntax provided here captures the general intent that an identifier consists of a string of characters beginning with a letter or an ideograph, and followed by any number of letters, ideographs, digits, or underscores" (Emphases original) Unicode has an unfortunate but particular definition of "ideograph", defined in the third sense of [1]. As a rule of thumb you should always mentally replace it with "Han character", which is not an ideogram (like numerals) but a logogram. This misnomer was too old to fix so Unicode decided to go with it. [1] https://unicode.org/glossary/#ideograph https://unicode.org/glossary/#ideograph
lapcat 3y ago
I stopped using emoji five years ago, because I disagree philosophically with the system. I think it's insane that displaying text should require software updates and fail to be backward compatible. Moreover, the demand for new emoji is insatiable, so the system is not practical or scalable. Unicode is not infinitely extensible. If I need to express myself without words, I stick to a few emoticons such as :-) ;-) and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That's all I really need.
- tetris11 3y ago
  What does `30C4` mean? (wit.)
- tiltowait 3y ago
  While I think there are many questionable emoji, and I find the constant emoji creep annoying, they do serve a few good functions. Used well, they can help break up text and draw your attention to specific parts. More importantly, however, they are much easier for screen readers to interpret, which has to help for accessibility.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > Used well I doubt that emoji are ever used well. > they can help break up text and draw your attention to specific parts. I'm not sure what this means? > More importantly, however, they are much easier for screen readers to interpret, which has to help for accessibility. Well, I use emoticons sparingly, mainly at the end of messages to specific people who I know don't use a screen reader. Nothing is easier to interpret than words.
- TheCoreh 3y ago
  The demand is far from insatiable, the linked site shows the number of new emoji per year has decreased dramatically, and most of the new ones are encoded with ZWJ sequences that don't really require new unicode codepoints. Also the existing system is (mostly) backwards compatible. The main issue is that it's not forwards compatible, with the exception of said ZWJ sequences.
maratc 3y ago
TIL "pregnant man" emoji exists.
gedy 3y ago
In my first developer role over 20 years ago we worked on email systems and we also had a Japanese office. One summer one of the Japanese developers came to work with us to add support for "emoji", which at the time was only a Japanese encoding thing afair. I remember being incredulous, thinking to myself "how could we add such a hack and ridiculous thing to our systems?" It just made no sense to me to add pictures to text encodings, like can't we just send images? Shows what I know, ha.
karaterobot 3y ago
Upon consideration, I gather that this is a list of the new emojis that were added each year. Some of them don't display correctly in my browser, so to me it just looked like meaningless garbage. Because it's a personal website, my first assumption was that this was a list of the author's most used emoji every year (it never occurred to me to ask why anyone would track this; it's the internet). The link at the bottom of the post makes it clearer. https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-versions.html https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-versions.html
butz 3y ago
Each year they are adding so many new emojis, but we are still lagging behind to use only emojis for daily communication. My missing emoji of the day is "mole".

23 points by surprisetalk 3y ago

Interesting that some emoji going back to 2020 don't render on my desktop browser. The flags don't show up either (just the two-letter codes).

aragonite 3y ago
If you want the flags right now you can install this font: https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags.html https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Flags.html
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Thank you :) Now I just need to figure out how to get 2023 emojis working in Windows 11.

smith7018 3y ago

I'm always impressed with how the Unicode Consortium decided to expand Emojis. It's cool to see that "head shaking horizontally" is just the smiling face + the left and right arrow unicodes or the new lime emoji is just the lemon and green square unicodes. Really smart and backwards compatible in a way.

rsynnott 3y ago
> or the new lime emoji is just the lemon and green square unicodes They missed an opportunity to just base it on citrus hybridisation; eg a key lime is micrantha X citron!

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

I didn't know how recent a lot of these were, or that unicode emojis were from 2010 for that matter.

aragonite 3y ago

As someone who greatly values the ability to (occasionally!) use emojis as/in identifiers in my personal-project code, I'll never understand why the Unicode Consortium chose to exclude emojis from the ID_START and ID_CONTINUE character classes [1] (in terms of which so many programming languages define their concept of a valid identifer). I'm not even sure the exclusion of emojis is consistent with their own explanation [2] of what an identifier should consist of, given that IMO an emoji pretty clearly qualifies as a 'ideograph' (a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept). It is reasonable to exclude non-representational characters like punctuations marks, dashes, parentheses, brackets, etc that intuitively don't 'stand for' anything and instead solely serve to delineate syntactic structure. But the vast majority of emojis are entirely unlike punctuations marks and do intuitively 'stand for' some idea or object. [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/ [2] "The formal syntax provided here captures the general intent that an identifier consists of a string of characters beginning with a letter or an ideograph, and followed by any number of letters, ideographs, digits, or underscores" (https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/#Default_Identifier_Syntax https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/#Default_Identifier_Syntax)

lifthrasiir 3y ago
> I'll never understand why the Unicode Consortium chose to exclude emojis from the ID_START and ID_CONTINUE character classes [1] (in terms of which so many programming languages define their concept of a valid identifer). Emojis are essentially colored symbols in terms of Unicode general categories and many languages do not accept symbols in an identifier, so it's no surprise that emojis are handled equally. UTR #31 does have a profile for identifiers with emoji (see the section 7.2), but it also demonstrates why it can't be a default: there are cases where `AB` is not valid but `ABC` is valid for some characters A, B and C. So character classes can't fully describe identifiers with emoji after all! (And in fact, many Unicode character classes were defined only for describing standard algorithms.) You need a full emoji regular expression to define such identifiers. > [2] "The formal syntax provided here captures the general intent that an identifier consists of a string of characters beginning with a letter or an ideograph, and followed by any number of letters, ideographs, digits, or underscores" (Emphases original) Unicode has an unfortunate but particular definition of "ideograph", defined in the third sense of [1]. As a rule of thumb you should always mentally replace it with "Han character", which is not an ideogram (like numerals) but a logogram. This misnomer was too old to fix so Unicode decided to go with it. [1] https://unicode.org/glossary/#ideograph https://unicode.org/glossary/#ideograph

lapcat 3y ago

I stopped using emoji five years ago, because I disagree philosophically with the system. I think it's insane that displaying text should require software updates and fail to be backward compatible. Moreover, the demand for new emoji is insatiable, so the system is not practical or scalable. Unicode is not infinitely extensible. If I need to express myself without words, I stick to a few emoticons such as :-) ;-) and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That's all I really need.

tetris11 3y ago
What does `30C4` mean? (wit.)
tiltowait 3y ago
While I think there are many questionable emoji, and I find the constant emoji creep annoying, they do serve a few good functions. Used well, they can help break up text and draw your attention to specific parts. More importantly, however, they are much easier for screen readers to interpret, which has to help for accessibility.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lapcat 3y ago
  > Used well I doubt that emoji are ever used well. > they can help break up text and draw your attention to specific parts. I'm not sure what this means? > More importantly, however, they are much easier for screen readers to interpret, which has to help for accessibility. Well, I use emoticons sparingly, mainly at the end of messages to specific people who I know don't use a screen reader. Nothing is easier to interpret than words.
TheCoreh 3y ago
The demand is far from insatiable, the linked site shows the number of new emoji per year has decreased dramatically, and most of the new ones are encoded with ZWJ sequences that don't really require new unicode codepoints. Also the existing system is (mostly) backwards compatible. The main issue is that it's not forwards compatible, with the exception of said ZWJ sequences.

maratc 3y ago

TIL "pregnant man" emoji exists.

gedy 3y ago

In my first developer role over 20 years ago we worked on email systems and we also had a Japanese office. One summer one of the Japanese developers came to work with us to add support for "emoji", which at the time was only a Japanese encoding thing afair. I remember being incredulous, thinking to myself "how could we add such a hack and ridiculous thing to our systems?" It just made no sense to me to add pictures to text encodings, like can't we just send images? Shows what I know, ha.

karaterobot 3y ago

Upon consideration, I gather that this is a list of the new emojis that were added each year. Some of them don't display correctly in my browser, so to me it just looked like meaningless garbage. Because it's a personal website, my first assumption was that this was a list of the author's most used emoji every year (it never occurred to me to ask why anyone would track this; it's the internet). The link at the bottom of the post makes it clearer. https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-versions.html https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-versions.html

butz 3y ago

Each year they are adding so many new emojis, but we are still lagging behind to use only emojis for daily communication. My missing emoji of the day is "mole".