Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Joakim]

On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 23:40:51 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
> Am Sun, 26 May 2013 21:25:36 +0200
> schrieb "Joakim" <joakim at airpost.net>:
>
>> On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 19:11:42 UTC, Mr. Anonymous wrote:
>> > On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 19:05:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> >> 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 the other hand:
>> > https://www.google.com/search?q=%22utf-8+is+awesome%22
>> I'm not sure if you were trying to make my point, but you just 
>> did.  There are only 19 results for that search string.  If 
>> UTF-8 were such a rousing success and most developers found it 
>> easy to understand, you wouldn't expect only 19 results for it 
>> and 8 against it.  The paucity of results suggests most don't 
>> know how it works or perhaps simply annoyed by it, liking the 
>> internationalization but disliking the complexity.
>
> Lol, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22utf-8+is+the+best%22
Your point is?  121 results, including false positives like
"utf-8 is the best guess."  If you look at the results, almost
all make the pragmatic recommendation that UTF-8 is the best _for
now_, because it is better supported than other multi-language
formats.  That's like saying Windows is the best OS because it's
easier to find one in your local computer store.

Yet again, the fact that even this somewhat ambiguous search
string has only 121 results is damning of anyone liking UTF-8,
nothing else, given the many thousands of programmmers that are
forced to use Unicode if they want to internationalize.