First Impressions!

[Walter Bright]

On 12/1/2017 8:08 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> And personally, I think that their worst decisions tend to be at the code
> point level (e.g. having the same character being representable by different
> combinations of code points).

Yup. I've presented that point of view a couple times on HackerNews, and some 
Unicode people took umbrage at that. The case they presented fell a little flat.


> Quite possbily the most depressing thing that I've run into with Unicode
> though was finding out that emojis had their own code points. Emojis are
> specifically representable by a sequence of existing characters (usually
> ASCII), because they came from folks trying to represent pictures with text.
> The fact that they're then trying to put those pictures into the Unicode
> standard just blatantly shows that the Unicode folks have lost sight of what
> they're up to. It's like if they started trying to add Unicode characters
> for words. It makes no sense. But unfortunately, we just have to live with
> it... :(

Yah, I've argued against that, too. And those "international" icons are arguably 
one of the dumber ideas to ever sweep the world, yet they seem to be celebrated 
without question.

Have you ever tried to look up an icon in a dictionary? It doesn't work. So if 
you don't know what an icon means, you're hosed. If it is a word you don't 
understand, you can look it up in a dictionary.

Furthermore, you don't need to know English to know what "ON" means. There is no 
more cognitive difficulty asking someone what "ON" means than there is asking 
what "|" means. Is an illiterate person from XxLand really going to understand 
that "|" means "ON" without help?

My car has a bunch emoticons labeling the controls. I can't figure out what any 
of them do without reading the manual, or just pushing random buttons until what 
I want happens. One button has an icon on it that looks like a snowflake. What 
does that do? Turn on the A/C? Defrost the frosty windows? Set the AWD in 
slippery mode? Turn on the Christmas lights?

On my pre-madness truck, they're labeled in English. Never had any trouble with 
that.

Part of the problem I've seen is that people do things like "vote for my 
emoji/icon and I'll vote for yours!" And then when they get something accepted, 
they wear it as a badge of status and write articles saying how you, too, can 
get your whatever accepted as an icon. It's madness, madness I say!