3 ms·

This is the kind of thing that doesn't matter till it does, which for most programmers (at least in the US) is never. When something bad happens you go off and

This is the kind of thing that doesn't matter till it does, which for most programmers (at least in the US) is never. When something bad happens you go off and learn some more, but, for a lot of people, it flat out won't be an issue.

nudded 17y ago
and programmers in the US don't write software that has to work in Europe too?
- jm4 17y ago
  Of course they do but not as often as one would think.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    On the other hand, the times when this attitude actually pans out in terms of broken character encoding is vanishingly small. All it takes is one person with an accented name, or someone pasting in smart quotes to break your application and make you look like an amateur. The idea that Americans only need ASCII is silly.
mbrubeck 17y ago
For web developers, it matters as soon as a user pastes text with curly quotes from a Word document web page. For other developers, it matters as soon as you have to parse a file format or use a protocol with non-ASCII data. I'm in the U.S., and I've eventually had to deal with character encoding at five of the six companies I've worked for.
lallysingh 17y ago
.. and then you rewrite all your string manipulations? Unlike other new technologies, you're already using it from the beginning (and in your approach, incorrectly). Spend the two hours to figure out how to do the basic work right at the beginning.
- prodigal_erik 17y ago
  This. At my workplace we had legacy code written by people who either didn't understand or didn't care about this stuff, and now our databases are full of crap that we literally have to guess how to correctly convert and render.
Kadin 17y ago
I've found that it matters pretty quickly. I've seen the Python conversion error alluded to in the article quite frequently, and if you search for it you'll find no shortage of people asking about it. Most programs have to deal with non-ASCII now. Even if your target audience and users are all English-speaking Americans, people are getting used to things like emdashes and smart quotes, and it's pretty bush league if your program doesn't support them or displays them incorrectly. The number of programmers who can just blithely ignore Unicode is dwindling by the day.
andrewvc 17y ago
To clarify, I meant the finer distinctions between UTF-8 and unicode aren't as important. I wasn't advocating just using ASCII. UTF-8 just works for most things. I wasn't saying character encodings and knowing how they interact isn't worthwhile. For the average western programmer, UTF-8 is generally the answer. The author of the article wants everyone to be full aware of the the significance of alternate encodings as well as how they relate to codepoints. That knowledge, while useful (and not really hard to learn in a broad sense), isn't useful for many software developers.
- prodigal_erik 17y ago
  There are platforms which use UCS-4 or UTF-16 (or even UCS-2) by default. You don't get UTF-8 unless you ask for it, which involves knowing not only that exists but that it's different from what you already had.

nudded 17y ago

and programmers in the US don't write software that has to work in Europe too?

jm4 17y ago
Of course they do but not as often as one would think.
- dasil003 17y ago
  On the other hand, the times when this attitude actually pans out in terms of broken character encoding is vanishingly small. All it takes is one person with an accented name, or someone pasting in smart quotes to break your application and make you look like an amateur. The idea that Americans only need ASCII is silly.

mbrubeck 17y ago

For web developers, it matters as soon as a user pastes text with curly quotes from a Word document web page. For other developers, it matters as soon as you have to parse a file format or use a protocol with non-ASCII data. I'm in the U.S., and I've eventually had to deal with character encoding at five of the six companies I've worked for.

lallysingh 17y ago

.. and then you rewrite all your string manipulations? Unlike other new technologies, you're already using it from the beginning (and in your approach, incorrectly). Spend the two hours to figure out how to do the basic work right at the beginning.

prodigal_erik 17y ago
This. At my workplace we had legacy code written by people who either didn't understand or didn't care about this stuff, and now our databases are full of crap that we literally have to guess how to correctly convert and render.

Kadin 17y ago

I've found that it matters pretty quickly. I've seen the Python conversion error alluded to in the article quite frequently, and if you search for it you'll find no shortage of people asking about it. Most programs have to deal with non-ASCII now. Even if your target audience and users are all English-speaking Americans, people are getting used to things like emdashes and smart quotes, and it's pretty bush league if your program doesn't support them or displays them incorrectly. The number of programmers who can just blithely ignore Unicode is dwindling by the day.

andrewvc 17y ago

To clarify, I meant the finer distinctions between UTF-8 and unicode aren't as important. I wasn't advocating just using ASCII. UTF-8 just works for most things. I wasn't saying character encodings and knowing how they interact isn't worthwhile. For the average western programmer, UTF-8 is generally the answer. The author of the article wants everyone to be full aware of the the significance of alternate encodings as well as how they relate to codepoints. That knowledge, while useful (and not really hard to learn in a broad sense), isn't useful for many software developers.

prodigal_erik 17y ago
There are platforms which use UCS-4 or UTF-16 (or even UCS-2) by default. You don't get UTF-8 unless you ask for it, which involves knowing not only that exists but that it's different from what you already had.