So, this is actually more about "your writing system, and legacy encodings of it, suck." While we do still have to support legacy encodings, increasingly we sh

So, this is actually more about "your writing system, and legacy encodings of it, suck." While we do still have to support legacy encodings, increasingly we should just be using a universal encoding that doesn't have all of these problems he mentions. UTF-8 is such an encoding; it is ASCII compatible, contains no nulls, has the usual ASCII control characters encoded the same, no shift sequences, if you jump to an arbitrary byte in the middle of a text there is a maximum number of bytes you need to go forward or backwards to find a character boundary and you can do so with no ambiguity, etc. And a large portion of the writing system suck rant has to do with Chinese (hanzi/kanji/hanja) characters, because there are just so many of them and standardizing them is a fairly difficult process. And it's true; that writing system does suck. It may have some good points, but it's amazing that it's still in use, it would be enormously economically beneficial to move to a simpler, easier to learn writing system. Of course, if you did that and people no longer learned the older, much more cumbersome and complicated system, they would lose access to a large number of older cultural works which do use it, so it's a pretty tough sell. Just to note, Korea actually does use a much simpler, more efficient writing system for the bulk of their text, but they do have a few words that they still use Chinese characters for. One of the reforms in North Korea was to abolish the use of Chinese characters entirely, using only the much simpler hangul writing system. His complaint about Korean is more due to how hangul is encoded in Unicode, which could be considered complex or clever depending on how you look at it; in any other sense, though, hangul is a great, very efficient and easy to deal with writing system.