Communication is not about glyps, it's about getting meaning across from one person to another and whatever works is good enough.
Schoene gruesse :)
But there's something to be said for preserving a few aspects of the diversity of cultures, as each one acts as its own preserve of centuries of wisdom. Hey, it's the German language that gave you Uber (the name). Which should actually be Über, but I digress. (and it'll be Over soon enough, anyway).
We've come a long way with making unicode universally available, and there's really no reason to give up now when it's almost done. It's not a big issue for German, but cultures with non-latin script would rightfully be offended if forced to abandon it for ASCII, in the same way that the world would be poorer if all restaurants were replaced by McDonald's.
I'm thinking of France here, which has something called the 'Academie Francaise' (apologies for butchering the c-cedille in this context, the accent aigu 'e' in cedille and acedemie). The only effect this seems to have had is some token re-inforcement of French as a 'world language', but in practice it became a 'come up with French words for words where we already have a perfectly good one that everybody the world over understands but which isn't French'.
If that's culture then I'd much more concentrate on the content than on the form and remove these artificial barriers. Which of course will lead to more and bloodier wars ;)
Unicode is great, it made all languages equal. But I don't see the point of artificially making the problem worse by introducing new glyphs, that's the wrong message to send. We should aim for simplification within limits (not to go down to carricature) and if German got by so far without the 'capital sharp S' I see absolutely no reason to introduce it in the modern age. It's a step back, a small one, but still.
Now, emoji, OTOH, just feels to me like unnecessarily polluting the character space. I'd much rather have a capital ß in the codespace than some smiling poo family.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15327r-n4704-medieval-punct....
However, I think it is important to note that the ẞ is not a letter they just made up. Heck, even the picture in the article shows an old book cover, which uses this never standardized letter. To me this is just correcting a previous oversight and formally allowing (not forcing) people to use the 'capital sharp s', for example in print, where they want to typeset a title in capitals.
For sorting there is standard (DIN 5007). Replacing ß with ss is correct (even in the lower case variant). The other letters are more fun: ä is replaced with a for sorting, except if you sort a list of names. In that case you need to replace it by ae. Probably not something international software is aware of. The Austrian sorting of names is different and other languages that have the same glyph (e.g. Swedish) also have other rules (e.g. by placing ä at the very end of the alphabet).
Collation rules that vary by locale exist for this reason, and all major programming languages and OS'es support this. Of course whether the software you use does this or not depends on the developers writing the software.
Actually, German has the Council of the German Language, which is what did this standardization effort of the new ẞ
This lazy way of writing had some valid technical reasons in the past (like phones not supporting diacritics), but these have long been solved.
P.S: if you think gendered nouns are hard, try language where almost everything is gendered: nouns, verbs, adjectives. In English: "I saw a nice boy walking"/"I saw a nice girl walking". In Lithuanian: "Mačiau gražų vaikiną einantį"/"Mačiau gražią merginą einančią".
And then there is this: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/51/91/e2/5191...
However, orthography does serve an important part in getting your point across. German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. The Umlauts serve a similar purpose to make it easier to differentiate words.
For instant messaging this probably does not matter too much, but what about books, technical reports, etc.? What's to gain from not using "proper" orthography in them, which might give the reader more hints about the sentence structure and hence its meaning?
Schöne Grüße ;)
For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter.
In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.
Except for digraph IJ, which needs both I and J capitalised, e.g., IJsselmeer.
> I'm mostly blind to 'case' […]
Most people aren't though. Leaving out capital letters where they should be jars the reader's flow. Let each language have its idiosyncrasies; it makes life more interesting.