Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 572 posts

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#81

Post by FinnKuhn »

dathinab wrote: post #66
oliwarner wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tracking every visitors' cursor and sharing it with every other visitor. Why would a frontend developer demonstrate their ability to do frontend programming on their personal, not altogether super-serious blog? I meant that rhetorically but it's a flex. I agree, not the best design in the world if you're catering for particular needs, but simple and fun enough. You should check out dark mode. In that vein, I thi…

> Why would because it shows that they don't understand important design aspects while it doesn't really show off their technical skills because it could be some plugin or copy pasted code, only someone who looks at the code would know better. But if someone care enough about you to look at your code you don't need to show of that skill on you normal web-site and can have some separate tech demo. > okay if we let peo…

I assume the creator didn't anticipate this amount of readers at the same time and having one or two other cursors on the page does sound fun and not too distracting. They should probably limit the maximum amount of other cursors displayed to a sensible amount

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#82

Post by zajio1am »

badcppdev wrote: post #57
qwerty456127 wrote: post #16

> The rest, about 800,000 code points, are not allocated at the moment. They could become characters in the future. Why is Tengwar still not in Uniclde officially? What's the problem with it?

To save other people the google: Tengwar is probably not in unicode because it is a fictional script from a book.

While U+A66E multiocular O can be found in just one manuscript, and it is still in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#83

Post by qwerty456127 »

grotorea wrote: post #74
qwerty456127 wrote: post #23

> People are not limited to a single locale. For example, I can read and write English (USA), English (UK), German, and Russian. Which locale should I set my computer to? Ideally - the "English-World" locale is supposedly meant for us, cosmopolitans. It's included with Windows 10 and 11. Practically, as "English-World" was not available in the past (and still wasn't available on platforms other than Windows the last…

> Practically, as "English-World" was not available in the past (and still wasn't available on platforms other than Windows the last time I checked), I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time. It's even w…

Thank you very much, I'll give it a try.

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#84

Post by samatman »

Please don't refer to codepoints as characters. Some are, some are not, it isn't a useful or informative approximation, it's just wrong. Unicode is a table which assigns unique numbers to different codepoints, most of which are characters. ZWJ is not a character at all, and extended grapheme clusters made of several codepoints are.

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#85

Post by layer8 »

nwellnhof wrote: post #47
tialaramex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, and Devanagari are important examples, I believe.

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#87

Post by justrealist »

I don't want to be too full of myself here, but I'm a very skilled and highly paid backend software engineer who knows roughly nothing about unicode (I google what I need when a file seems f'd up), and it's never been a problem for me.

I'm sure the article is good but the title is nonsense.

Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

#90

Post by arp242 »

asherah wrote: post #73
nwellnhof wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one writing system where you really need character composition. Even if there is one, these special cases should be handled outside of Unicode.

you can't not handle devanagari, tamil (or like half the scripts across the Indian subcontinent and oceania) or hangul. even the IPA, used by linguists every day, would be particularly bad to deal with if we couldn't write things like /á̤/, and some languages already don't have the precomposed diacritics for all letters (like ǿ), so the idea of a world with only precomposed letter forms is more of a exponential exp…

> so the idea of a world with only precomposed letter forms is more of a exponential explosion in the character set

"Exponential explosion" is really putting it too strong; it's perfectly possible to just add ǿ and á̤ and a bunch of other things. The combinations aren't infinite here.

The problem with e.g. Latin script isn't necessarily that combining characters exist, but that there's two ways to represent many things. That really is just a "mess": use either one system or the other, but not both. Hangul has similar problems.

Devanagari doesn't have any pre-compose characters AFAIK, so that's fine.

That's really the "mess": it's a hodgepodge of different systems, and you can't even know which system to use a lot of the time because it's not organised ("look it up in a large database"), and even taking in to account historical legacy I don't think it really needed to be like this (or is even an unfixable problem today, strictly speaking).

At least they deprecated ligatures like st and fl, although recently I did see ij being used in the wild.

Post reply on HN