What on EARTH is that mouse cursor thing all about? Why would you even bother writing this, then making it impossible to read properly?
What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
41–50 of 572 posts
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#42Unicode is a total mess. In a sane system, "extended grapheme clusters" would equal "codepoints" and it wouldn't make a difference for 99% of languages. Now we ended up with grapheme clusters, normalization, decomposition, composition, Zalgo text, etc. But instead of deprecating this nonsense, Unicode doubled down with composed Emojis.
The writing systems were already like this when we got them. Unicode's "total mess" mostly just reflects that. Of course it would be convenient for you, the programmer, if the users wanted the software to do whatever was easiest for you, but obviously they want what's easiest for them, not you.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#43Unicode is a total mess. In a sane system, "extended grapheme clusters" would equal "codepoints" and it wouldn't make a difference for 99% of languages. Now we ended up with grapheme clusters, normalization, decomposition, composition, Zalgo text, etc. But instead of deprecating this nonsense, Unicode doubled down with composed Emojis.
What sort of practical issues are you running into due to Unicode's codepoint compositionality?
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#44Unicode is a total mess. In a sane system, "extended grapheme clusters" would equal "codepoints" and it wouldn't make a difference for 99% of languages. Now we ended up with grapheme clusters, normalization, decomposition, composition, Zalgo text, etc. But instead of deprecating this nonsense, Unicode doubled down with composed Emojis.
I feel its the same as with any long standing computer system we have today. It was designed as more and more of the world came online and all the growing pains it came with. Could it be built from scratch today better? Yes. Will it? No. I suspect it will be around long after we are all dead. Same with IPv4 :V
Be the change you want to see in the world. If we're going to make huge breaking changes, might as well do it sooner rather than later.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#45Is it just me, or is anyone else seeing what looks like the mouse pointer of everyone else reading the page, like 1,000 little ants on the screen
Yep, the website opens a websocket connection[0] and sends the mouse position every 1 second
[0] WS connection is on `wss://tonsky.me/pointers?id=XXXXXX&page=/blog/unicode/&platform=XXX`
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#46> The only modern language that gets it right is Swift:
I disagree.
What is the "right" things is use-case dependent.
For UI it's glyph bases, kinda, more precise some good enough abstraction over render width. For which glyphs are not always good enough but also the best you can get without adding a ton of complexity.
But for pretty much every other use-case you want storage byte size.
I mean in the UI you care about the length of a string because there is limited width to render a strings.
But everywhere else you care about it because of (memory) resource limitations and costs in various ways. Weather that is for bandwidth cost, storage cost, number of network packages, efficient index-ability, etc. etc. In rare cases being able to type it, but then it's often us-ascii only, too.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#47Unicode is a total mess. In a sane system, "extended grapheme clusters" would equal "codepoints" and it wouldn't make a difference for 99% of languages. Now we ended up with grapheme clusters, normalization, decomposition, composition, Zalgo text, etc. But instead of deprecating this nonsense, Unicode doubled down with composed Emojis.
The writing systems were already like this when we got them. Unicode's "total mess" mostly just reflects that. Of course it would be convenient for you, the programmer, if the users wanted the software to do whatever was easiest for you, but obviously they want what's easiest for them, not you.
Name one writing system where you really need character composition. Even if there is one, these special cases should be handled outside of Unicode.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#48Just a nitpick because the page says: "Unicode is a standard that aims to unify all human languages, both past and present, and make them work with computers." but of course unicode is only relevant to written languages as opposed to spoken languages (and signed languages)
I wish that was the only thing wrong with that page
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#49Unicode is a total mess. In a sane system, "extended grapheme clusters" would equal "codepoints" and it wouldn't make a difference for 99% of languages. Now we ended up with grapheme clusters, normalization, decomposition, composition, Zalgo text, etc. But instead of deprecating this nonsense, Unicode doubled down with composed Emojis.
They kind of have to don’t they? Otherwise we’ll become space-limited way too fast? Especially with how quickly new emojis are being made and all their variants.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel its the same as with any long standing computer system we have today. It was designed as more and more of the world came online and all the growing pains it came with. Could it be built from scratch today better? Yes. Will it? No. I suspect it will be around long after we are all dead. Same with IPv4 :V
Be the change you want to see in the world. If we're going to make huge breaking changes, might as well do it sooner rather than later.
With something as large as a end user language format for input, this is a change we ourselves cannot make, just as using another calendar for dates. Just because I want to use the year 2002023 calendar with 29.5 days per month, doesn't make it useful to others or myself really.