Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[monarch_dodra]

On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/29/2013 3:26 AM, qznc wrote:
>> Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks. 
>> They coded
>> business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant 
>> financial concepts with
>> german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), which sometimes 
>> include äöüß. Some of
>> those concept had no good translation into english, because 
>> they are not used
>> outside of Germany and the clients prefer the actual names 
>> anyways.
>
> German is pretty easy to do in ASCII: Vermoegen and Buergschaft

What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can 
tell you for a fact that they very much don't like reading it 
that way.

You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of 
devs simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just 
being able to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other 
countries, but I'm sure that large but not spread out countries 
like China would also just *love* to be able to code in 100% 
Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care much for English either).

I think this possibility is actually a brilliant feature that 
could help popularize the language oversees, especially in 
teaching courses, or the private sector. Why not turn down a 
feature that makes us popular?

As for research/university, I think they are already global 
enough to stick to English anyways.

No matter how I see it, I can only see benefits to keeping it, 
and downsides to turning it down.