[OT] The Case Against... Unicode?

[Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 15:02:33 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 13:57:27 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>
>> No, I explicitly said not the web in a subsequent post.  The 
>> ignorance here of what 2G speeds are like is mind-boggling.
>>
> It's not hard.  I think a lot of us remember when a 14.4 modem 
> was cutting-edge.  Codepages and incompatible encodings were 
> terrible then, too.
>
> Never again.
>
>> Well, when you _like_ a ludicrous encoding like UTF-8, not 
>> sure your opinion matters.
>
> It _is_ kind of ludicrous, isn't it?  But it really is the 
> least-bad option for the most text.  Sorry, bub.
>
>>> No. The common string-handling use case is code that is 
>>> unaware which script (not language, btw) your text is in.
>>
>> Lol, this may be the dumbest argument put forth yet.
>
> This just makes it feel like you're trolling.  You're not just 
> trolling, right?
>
>> I don't think anyone here even understands what a good 
>> encoding is and what it's for, which is why there's no point 
>> in debating this.
>
> And I don't think you realise how backwards you sound to people 
> who had to live through the character encoding hell of the 
> past.  This has been an ongoing headache for the better part of 
> a century (it still comes up in old files, sites, and systems) 
> and you're literally the only person I've ever seen seriously 
> suggest we turn back now that the madness has been somewhat 
> tamed.

Indeed, Joakim's proposal is so insane it beggars belief (why not 
go back to baudot encoding, it's only 5 bit, hurray, it's so much 
faster when used with flag semaphores).

As a programmer in the European Commission translation unit, 
working on the probably biggest translation memory in the world 
for 14 years, I can attest that Unicode is a blessing. When I 
remember the shit we had in our documents because of the code 
pages before most programs could handle utf-8 or utf-16 (and 
before 2004 we only had 2 alphabets to take care of, Western and 
Greek). What Joakim does not understand, is that there are huge, 
huge quantities of documents that are multi-lingual. Translators 
of course handle nearly exclusively with at least bi-lingual 
documents. Any document encountered by a translator must at least 
be able to present the source and the target language. But even 
outside of that specific population, multilingual documents are 
very, very common.

>
> If you have to deal with delivering the fastest possible i18n 
> at GSM data rates, well, that's a tough problem and it sounds 
> like you might need to do something pretty special. Turning the 
> entire ecosystem into your special case is not the answer.
>