Unicode Is Awesome

Unicode reverse character:

'hello \u{202e} world'; 'hello dlrow' // Visual equivalent

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I mean, awesome for whom? It might be awesome for end users as you can type in or copy/paste things without caring which language you're using. But for programmers, Unicode is a bloated monstrosity and a source of endless nightmare. Eventually, it's not going to be awesome for end users either because it will be plagued by a lot of (subtle) inconsistencies. Unicode looks a lot like a leaky abstraction to me (because of poor foresight), and it's getting worse each year.

Unicode is pretty amazing.

People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that legacy digital text encodings historically had happened differently than they did, they're not actually complaining about unicode at all, which had to deal with the hand of cards it was dealt.

That unicode worked out as nice a solution as it is to storing global text is pretty amazing, there were some really smart and competent people working on it. When you dig into the details, you will be continually amazed how nice it is. And how well-documented.

One real testament to this is how _well adopted_ Unicode is. There is no actual guarantee that just because you make a standard anyone will use it. Nobody forced anyone to move from whatever they did to Unicode. (and in fact most eg internet standards don't force Unicode and are technically agnostic as to text encoding). That it has become so universal is because it was so well-designed, it solved real problems, with a feasible migration path for developers that had a cost justified by it's benefits. (When people complain about aspects of UTF-8 required by it's multi-facetted compatibility with ascii, they are missing that this is what led to unicode actually winning).

The OP, despite the title, doesn't actually serve as a great argument/explanation for how Unicode is awesome. But I'd read some of the Unicode "annex" docs -- they are also great docs!

If you think Unicode is a "bloated monstrosity and a source of endless nightmare," what would you remove from Unicode?

And if you're going to respond "emoji", I'll point out that removing emoji doesn't actually remove anything that makes text processing with Unicode difficult, just makes it more likely that people will assume that what works for English works for everybody.

(Side note: it is not possible to accurately represent modern English text solely with ASCII, as English does contain several words with accented characters, such as façade and résumé).