It's not really a 'hack', but making it backward compatible with ASCII while maintaining a lot of other desirable properties is quite elegant. A lot of people

It's not really a 'hack', but making it backward compatible with ASCII while maintaining a lot of other desirable properties is quite elegant. A lot of people complain about not being able to easily or programmatically manipulate UTF-8 strings on a character-by-character basis, like it's a typical programmers daily business to go messing with natural language, but I've never seen the great loss.