Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Joakim]

On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 18:29:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 5/26/13 1:45 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> What is extraordinary about "UTF-8 is shit?" It is obviously 
>> so.
>
> Congratulations, you are literally the only person on the 
> Internet who said so: http://goo.gl/TFhUO
Haha, that is funny, :D though "unicode is shit" returns at least 
8 results.  How many people even know how UTF-8 works?  Given how 
few people use it, I'm not surprised most don't know enough about 
how it works to criticize it.

> On 5/26/13 1:45 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> Or it could just be that I'm much smarter than everybody else 
>> in this
>> thread, ;) I can't rule it out given the often silly responses 
>> I've been
>> getting.
>
> One odd thing about this thread is it's extremely rare that 
> most everybody in this forum raises like one to the same 
> opinion. Usually it's like whatever the topic, a debate will 
> ensue between two ad-hoc groups.
I suspect it's because I'm presenting an original idea about a 
not well-understood technology, Unicode, not the usual "emacs vs 
vim" or "D should not have null references" argument.  For 
example, how many here know what UCS is?  Most people never dig 
into Unicode, it's just a black box that is annoying to deal with.

> It has become clear that people involved in this have gotten 
> too frustrated to have a constructive exchange. I suggest we 
> collectively drop it. What you may want to do is to use D's 
> modeling abilities to define a great string type pursuant to 
> your ideas. If it is as good as you believe it could, then it 
> will enjoy use and adoption and everybody will be better off.
I agree.  I am enjoying your book, btw.