Dear software people,
Unicode is older now than ASCII was when Unicode was introduced. It’s not a weird new fad.
It’s complicated but so is the domain it represents. We recognize that we have to think about time zones and leap days and seconds, for instance. And it’s a cleaner abstraction when you aren’t halfhearted about it.
Sincerely,
Charlie
@vruba but isn't it a solved problem by now? Nobody writes new software that's not unicode-aware (and it would be hard to do, because all the systems and languages do it by default now). Converting old software is another matter of course, but that's not specific to Unicode.
@isagalaev It’s a technically solved problem if you make the effort to use the solutions. Some don’t. They assume that a character is a byte, or they consider systems that mishandle Unicode to be good enough to keep in service. That’s the halfheartedness I mean. It may not be specific to Unicode but it’s real.
(Analogously, you still see bugs from daylight saving time shifts, integer overflows, SQL injection, and other problems that are totally solved if you bother to use the solutions.)
