Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Joakim]

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.