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The Absolute Minimum Every Developer Must Know About Unicode (2003)

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Absolute Minimum Every Developer Must Know About Unicode (2003)

#3

Joel is pretty good, but UTF-8 wasn't designed by California hippies. It was designed in New Jersey by a Louisianan (Ken Thompson) and a Canadian (Rob Pike).

I think what he's saying is we had unicode in the form of UCS-2 but Silicon Valley programmers refused to use it because it was wasteful.

When Thompson and Pike finally invented UTF-8 was when things started getting moving.