No, martinced, it doesn't work like that. Encodings are data formats, and with the Internet connecting everything to everything, you have data generated by ever

No, martinced, it doesn't work like that. Encodings are data formats, and with the Internet connecting everything to everything, you have data generated by every programming language ever written and every protocol ever used swirling around you all the time. What a delight it would be if all text data were UTF-8, but it's not. So, you have to take what you get as input, do whatever processing you do with your part in the system, and output what your receiver demands. In the general case, you can't control the whole system, regardless of what tools you choose to use. I specialize in software that deals with non-Western scripts (writing systems), and my life would be easier (and less profitable) if everyone used a Unicode encoding for everything (I don't care WHICH Unicode encoding), but the legacy stuff will be around for years. In the meantime, it doesn't matter whether you use Go or Java or Python 3, you'll still have to deal with the fact that others out there use Python 2 or C or a MacRoman Web app (yes, I had to deal with one) or SQLServer's broken "UTF-8" or whatever to generate encoding mess you have to deal with. The fact that your language does things well internally is a great feature but won't insulate you from trouble if you have to deal with the outside world, as most of us do.