Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Mr. Anonymous]

On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 19:25:37 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> 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.

Man, you're a bullshit machine!