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When you think about all the time, money and effort that have been wasted on Unicode...
by tiahura 2y ago
When you think about all the time, money and effort that have been wasted on Unicode...
- kalleboo 2y agoYeah we should have all just stuck to Shift-JIS
- Joker_vD 2y agoВсеки трябва да използва латиница, абсолютно съм съгласен. After all, it's objectively the most perfect set of characters for any reasonable human language.
- febusravenga 2y agoRandom cross-language-script observation. In Bulgarian, латиница ("latin alphabet") transliterated to latin alphabet is just "latinitsa" or "latinica". In Polish "cyrillic" is "cyrylica" - basically reverse.
- pjc50 2y agoWhat's your preferred solution for representing the CJK languages?
- tiahura 2y agoComputing did pretty well in the prior 50 years.
- pjc50 2y agoThat's not an answer. Be specific. How do you want to represent the 97k CJK characters?
- vman81 2y agoI really don't want to be snarky or sarcastic, so I'll just be plain. Many people are unwilling or unable to understand a problem that doesn't affect them directly. Like - "UTF is woke" kind of people. They are out there.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y agoNot for the majority of the world population who doesn't know English
- jcranmer 2y agoI still remember the days when I couldn't use π and é in the same document, because there was no codepage that contained both of them. I also remember the days when pretty much any website that had non-English text had to have instructions on it for how to view it properly, because mojibake was so bloody common. (It should also tell you something that not only is there a name for "computers failed at charsets", but the name is Japanese.)
- School-Cotton 2y agoOnly if you could expect a given person to only ever deal with one language. Anything international sucked and was a much bigger pain than now. It would be impossible to e.g. build a site like Reddit where people can comment in any language.
- vman81 2y agoComputing has improved massively over the last 50 years, not least because it now can accommodate peoples diverse languages.
- kryptiskt 2y agoNo, it didn't. There were all kinds of encodings out there, and dealing with code pages was way worse than any inconveniences that Unicode has brought. Unicode was created for a reason, not just to torture US programmers with the diversity of scripts in the world. Maybe it was nice if you worked for a US company without any operations abroad, which includes absolutely none of those which mattered.
- account42 2y agoYou still need to deal with "codepages" to differentiate between Japanese Unicode and Chinese Unicode even if it's called a language and not codepage now.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y agoHan unification sucks indeed but if you get the wrong font it's still readable
- numpad0 2y agoSometimes, not always. Depends on how similar specific characters happen to be.
- dotancohen 2y agoOnly if your name isn't 東久邇宮稔彦王.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throw0101a 2y ago> Computing did pretty well in the prior 50 years. Contra: * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25812790/wrong-characters-in-some-e-mail-clients https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25812790/wrong-character...
- Muromec 2y agoI had to, in the year of our lord 2024, deal with a certain non-unicode system that ate one specific Cyrillic symbol when producing an open data artifact mandated by law. It was never fun then and it's still manages to create problems.
- account42 2y agoSomething that doesn't unify different characters. So not Unicode.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoWhat alternative do you propose? I mean personally I think that emoji don't belong in unicode, but at the same time it's been integrated into society for many years now and it's made communications platforms so much more streamlined. But how else would you represent non-latin characters? More character sets?
- a3w 2y ago> emoji don't belong in unicode Well, they are defined as: "an intermediate technology until we find a way to transfer images over data connections." So it was always a technology that was 40 years too late to the party?
- layer8 2y agoWithout it, all textual data would need its own charset header, and you couldn’t freely copy & paste between pieces of text with different charsets without creating mangled garbage. This was the situation before Unicode (except that charsets were often only implicit, so you had to guess which it is).