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What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023

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

#201

Post by OfSanguineFire »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #139
DoughnutHole wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects It's worthwhile purely for the sake of autocorrect/typo highlighting in text-editing software. I don't miss the days of spelling a word correctly in my version of English but still being stuck with the visual noise of red highlighting up and down the document because it doesn't conform to US English.

Yeah I'd rather not have my British English dialect seen as second-class in a world of American English ideally which is what having a red document full of 'errors' implies in those sorts of situations. It's sometimes not a trivial distinction either, for example I've heard of cases where surprised British redditors have found themselves banned from American subreddits for being homophobic when they were actually tal…

I would think a lot of mods, who are either Highly Online Americans or their weirdo equivalents in other countries, are well aware of the UK usage, but simply expect Brits to give it up in order to avoid offending Americans and the global Reddit community that largely takes American-style sensitivity as its orthodoxy. And considering that Reddit corporate feels that anything that could stir up such outrage is bad for business, mods of popular subreddits may well feel pressured to come down hard on these matters.

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

#202

Post by thyselius »

Wonderful to learn more about Unicode.

Does anyone know how to write a function (preferably in swift) to remove emoji? This is surprisingly hard (if the string can be any language, like English or Chinese).

There’s been multiple attempts on Stackoverflow but they’re all missing some of them, as Unicode is so complex.

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

#203

Post by nottorp »

> Since everybody in the world agrees on which numbers correspond to which characters, and we all agree to use Unicode, we can read each other’s texts.

Hmm? I thought some code points combine to create a character. Even accented latin ones can be like that.

Also we need to agree on what is a character.

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

#204

Post by ksoped »

superq wrote: post #191
ericmcer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he added moving cursors all over the page because he thought it was good UI/UX, he knows what he is doing.

This is seemingly self-contradictory. Perhaps you could explain your reasoning further?

You gotta know the rules to bend the rules

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

#205

Post by preciousoo »

w10-1 wrote: post #192

A real question is why IBM, Apple, and Microsoft poured millions into developing the unicode standard instead of treating character encoding like file formats as a venue for competition. IBM and Apple in the early 1990's combined in Taligent to try to beat MS NT, but failed. But a lot of internationalization came out of that and was made open, at the perfect time for Java to adopt it. Interestingly it wasn't just CJK…

You can ask why they didn’t do the same for networking and serial protocols too.

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

#206

Post by Scarbutt »

superq wrote: post #191
ericmcer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he added moving cursors all over the page because he thought it was good UI/UX, he knows what he is doing.

This is seemingly self-contradictory. Perhaps you could explain your reasoning further?

It's called satire.

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

#207

Post by oliwarner »

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…

> people don't get hired to have fun

Living by that motto is hugely self-destructive.

Creative expression allows us to push ourselves, both in what we think we can do, and often the technical aspects about how we do it too. Even if the idea doesn't stick, you've tried something new.

In a world of Tailwinds and Bootstraps and the same five templates copied again and again and again, let's celebrate the people willing to push things and learn from their inevitable but ultimately valuable mistakes. And let's have some fun along the way.

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

#209

Post by mcfedr »

zajio1am wrote: post #78
ilyt wrote: post #32

> Unicode is locale-dependent Well, there is a new fact that I learned and immediately hated. The fuck were authors thinking... I am now firmly convinced people developing unicode hate developers. I suspected it before just due to how messy it was (same character having different encodings ? Really ? Fuck you), but this cements it.

Unicode is not locale-dependent, just mapping from graphemes to (font) glyphs is locale/font dependent.

The author shows how to-upper and to-lower change according to locale

But making it clear which glyph to use is also a key feature!

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

#210

Post by gumby »

gwervc wrote: post #118
gumby wrote: post #64

This is quite a good write up. An answer to one of the author's questions: > Why does the fi ligature even have its own code point? No idea. On of the principles of Unicode is round trip compatibility. That is you should be able to read in a file encoded with some obsolete coding system and write it out again properly. Maybe frob it a bit with your unicode-based tools first. This is a good principle, though less usefu…

The circled digits as code points are very nice to have precisely because they are available in applications that don't support them otherwise... which is actually most of the software I can think of (Notepad, Apple Notes, chat applications, most websites, etc).

My point was that, had they not been legacy characters (or had RT compatibility been disregarded) Unicode could still have supported them as composed characters. Though I personally still feel they are a kind of ligature or graphic, but luckily for everyone else I’m not the dictator of the world :-).

We should be careful: someone on HN could write a proposal that they should be considered pre composed forms that should also have an un-composed sequence… so there could in future be not just 1 in a circle but 1 ZWJ circle, circle ZWJ 1 all considered the same…I can imagine some HN readers being pranksters like that.

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