#50 is the most appalling. Everybody should just use MacPorts to install npm to install bower. :P Joking aside, I have mixed feelings about #3. On the one ha

#50 is the most appalling. Everybody should just use MacPorts to install npm to install bower. :P Joking aside, I have mixed feelings about #3. On the one hand, the current version of Unicode certainly doesn't cover every character in every known language yet. On the other hand, it's about the best darn effort the world has mustered towards a universal encoding. As far as encoding goes, I don't think it's wrong to rely on Unicode as the solution. In any case, it's better than every country rolling their own incompatible encoding. Programmers just need to keep in mind that Unicode is an evolving standard - it's at version 7 as we speak. Besides, Unicode has a lot of spare code points and all of human civilised history probably hasn't invented enough glyphs and characters to use them up. If you want to talk about possible outerspace alien languages, well, you'll have other problems, and character encoding won't be your first problem. And if you're worried about the (in)equivalence between, say ß and ss, then that's a collation problem, and encoding seems the wrong place to solve it because collation is context-dependent.