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"Unicode" aka "wide characters" is the dumbest engineering debacle of the century. > ascii and codepage encodings are legacy, let's standardize on another forw
by otabdeveloper4 1y ago
"Unicode" aka "wide characters" is the dumbest engineering debacle of the century.
> ascii and codepage encodings are legacy, let's standardize on another forwards-incompatible standard that will be obsolete in five years
> oh, and we also need to upgrade all our infrastructure for this obsolete-by-design standard because we're now keeping it forever
- Dylan16807 1y agoWhat about Unicode isn't forward compatible? UCS-2 was an encoding mistake, but even it was pretty forward compatible
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago"Unicode" here means the OG Unicode that was supposed to fit all of past, current and future languages in exactly 16 bits. Yes, it's a silly idea but it's exactly the reason why Python, Javascript and Java use the most brainded way of storing text known to man. (UCS-2)
- Dylan16807 1y ago> "Unicode" here means the OG Unicode that was supposed to fit all of past, current and future languages in exactly 16 bits. Well... it explicitly wasn't supposed to fit all past characters when they decided on 16 bits. And they weren't sure on size for a while, and only kept it for a couple years, so I would make the fact that you're complaining about the 16 bits more explicit. But also it did turn out to be forward compatible. That's part of why we're stuck with it!