I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

And Norwegian (for æ). We have æ/Æ and ø/Ø (distinct, in theory, from the symbol for the empty set, btw), while å/Å used to be written aa/AA a long time ago (but is obviously not a result of combining two a's). Swedish uses ö/Ö for essentially ø/Ø, ä/Ä for æ/Æ. And both of those I can only easily type by combining the dot-dot, with o/O, a/A because my Norwegian keyboard layout has key for/labelled øæå, not öäå.

For Japanese (and Chinese and a few others) things are even more complicated. It's tricky to fit ~5000 symbols on a keyboard, so typically in Japan one types on either a phonetic layout, or a latin layout, and translate to Kanji as needed (eg: "nihongo" or "にほんご" is transformed to "日本語" -- note also that "ご" itself is a compound character, "ko" modified by two dots to become "go" -- which may or may not be entered as a compound, with a modifier key).

As I currently don't have any Japanese input installed under xorg, that last bit I had to cut and paste.

It is entirely valid to view ø as a combination of o and a (short) slash, or å as a combination of "a" and "°" -- but if one does that while typing, it is important that software handles the compound correctly (and distinct from ligatures, as mentioned above). My brother's name, "Ståle" is five letters/symbols long, if reversed it becomes "elåtS", not "el°atS" (six symbols).

So, yeah, it's complicated. Remember that we've spent many years fighting the hack that was ascii, extended ascii (which may be (part of) why eg: Norwegian gets to have å rather than a+°). You still can't easily use utf8 with neither C nor, as I understand it C++ (almost, but not quite -- AFAIK one easy workaround is to use QT's strings if one can have qt as a dependency -- and it's still a mess on Windows, due to their botched wide char hacks... etc).

All in all, while it's nice to think that one can take some modernized, English-centric ideas evolved from the Gutenberg press, and mash it together with what constitutes a "letter" (How hard is it to reverse a string!? How hard is it to count letters!? How hard is it to count words?!) -- that approach is simply wrong.

There will always be magic, and there'll be very few things that can be said with confidence to be valid across all locales. What is to_upper("日本語"), reverse("Ståle"), character_count("Ståle"), word_count("日本語") etc.

This turned into a bit more of an essay than I intended, sorry about that :-)

What is amazing here is that everybody is talking about the character "ৎ" instead of talking about the real issue.

I guess that the main point of the article is that the Unicode Standard is being decided by a bunch of North American and European people, instead of being decided by the speakers of the languages Unicode is intended to.

In my opinion, for instance, Han Unification is a botch and no Japanese would consider that it makes sense.

The poo emoji is not part of Unicode because rich white old cis-gendered mono-lingual oppressive hetero men thought it'd be a fun idea (outrage now!!). Emoji were adopted from existing cellphone "characters" in Japan, and Japan is famously lagging in Unicode adoption because some Japanese names cannot (could not?) be written in Unicode. It all just seems to be very normal (=inefficient, quirky) design by committee.

Even though I'm not a native english speaker and couldn't write my name in ASCI, I really despise Unicode.

Its broken technically and a setback socially.

Unicode itself is such a unfathomably huge project that it's impossible to do it right, too many languages, too many weird writing systems, and too many ways to do mathematical notation on paper that can't be expressed. Just look at the code pages, they are an utter mess.

Computers and ASCI were a chance to start anew, to establish english as a universal language, spoken by everybody.

The pressure on governments who would wanted to partake in the digital revolution would have forced them to introduce it as an official secondary language.

Granted english is not the nicest language, but is the best candidate we have in terms of adoption, and relative simplicity (Mandarin is another contester, but several thousand logograms are really impractical to encode.).

Take a look at the open source world, where everybody speaks english and collaborates regardless of nationality. One of the main factors why this is possible, is that we found a common language, forced on us by the tools and programming languages we use.

If humanity wants get rid of wars, poverty and nationalism, we have to find a common language first.

A simple encoding and universal communication is a feature, fragmented communication is the bug.

Besides. UTF-8 is broken because it doesn't allow for constant time random character access and length counting.

Unicode is notoriously tricky to implement, there have been bugs where users could take over others accounts by choosing a different unicode representation of the same string.

I'd much rather have something that works and is simple. Than something that makes it easy for everybody and is broken.