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Comment by euske | Hacker News Reader

How timely. I was reading the Unicode Standard the other day, and realized how this seemingly simple project of "modelling a character with a number" has become a huge, sprawling behemoth over years because they tried to cover every aspect of human language; I'm sure it's going to be even more convoluted and politicized in future, and it will never be complete.

And this brings me two sides of the argument: should software capture every aspect of human life with all of its complications, or humans should change their lifestyle to fit a software framework? This is probably a never ending discussion, and I'm keen to listen to both sides.

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What lifestyle change do you suggest? That people in China (as one example of many) switch to ASCII and stop using Chinese characters when they use computers?

Unicode exists because people all over the world want to represent their written language on computers, and that seems like a reasonable thing to want. Software needs to serve reasonable human needs such as writing systems.

Unicode is terrible. They can use Chinese character coding when writing in Chinese on the computer (perhaps cangjie encoding), and use ASCII when dealing with computer codes which are based on ASCII.

Unicode was invented to avoid the kind of thing you are suggesting, and that's why it is popular.

ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.

Yes, although Unicode is still a mess. (One thing Unicode is good for though (if you removed the emoji and a lot of other stuff) is searching documents in multiple languages all from one interface. However, someone on IRC mentioned Duocode, and I think that would be even better for such purpose. But for other purposes it can be variously less good.)

Duocode seems to be a javascript compiler, not alternative to unicode.

That is something else with the same name, and is not the same as the Duocode I saw mentioned on IRC.

Can you link to the thing you're talking about?

> ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.

Such as?

Forward and backward quote marks. Different kinds of dash - the en-dash and em-dash.

Emojis.

Some people would argue that emojis don't belong in Unicode because they evolve too quickly and new ones need to be added too often, and the Unicode standard simply won't be able to keep up. As such it would hinder the expression of users, and it would stifle the evolution of online expression.

Unicode (ISO/IEC 10646) is without doubt a hugely successful project. But like every huge project, it keeps nurturing itself ad infinitum, and is becoming absurd in the process (for example, Unicode has also captured emojis). As Unicode is covering more and more symbols all the time, it becomes less and less useful for its original purpose to communicate the character set encoding standard used in a document. Eg a basic info about a document is whether it can be rendered with a given font, but Unicode (or a character encoding information such as "utf-8") totally fails this basic use case, and one has to build small ad-hoc subsets within Unicode for this purpose instead.

> Unicode has also captured emojis

Yes and a huge downside of this is that we're now stuck with an incomplete set of them.

Wait, are there really people who think humans should change their lives to fit a software framework?

Well, we altered our natural circadian rhythms to fit time zones and daylight savings time, so it doesn't seem that far fetched to me.

It happens anyway. Humans are more flexible and adjusting than software I guess. For example: where I am from, people use Hindi language to communicate but write Hindi using Latin alphabets rather than native Hindi alphabets, especially when typing on mobile phones. This is a result of Hindi letters being inherently complex in writing and lack of proper software ecosystem available (keyboard autocomplete, swiping etc)

Billions of people who don't speak English use websites in English because they have no choice.

Culture has always adapted around technology and products available.

Think about food. Pretty much every world cuisine is rooted in a bunch of non-optional requirements imposed by local climate, soil, etc.

Even language has shifted to adapt to writing systems over time.

Kazakhstan decided last year to convert from Cyrillic script to Latin, with software interoperability being one reason for moving, so I guess in practice yes, there really are those people - although there's always a bit of nuance in that kind of decision.

This isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but I’ve read about large companies engaging in tortuous reorgs just to conform to the constraints of their new shiny new SAP implementations. I wonder how much truth there is to those stories.

Yes. It will happen whether it’s desireable or not. For example, I think it’s inevitable that the US will use an ISO date format eventually, and further down the line I think many Asian scripts will be replaced with western etc.

> I think it’s inevitable that the US will use an ISO date format eventually

About half the programmers I know (including myself) already write dates as 2019-10-27 even when using a pen, it really is a more convenient format.

Yes, I regularly do that myself.

That is a stupendously dangerous question to ask, and that the answer is not crystal clear from the outset is terrifying. When humanity and computers collide, the computer is always in the wrong. Every single time, forever. At no point is it acceptable to ask that any human being alter their culture, lifestyle, or thinking because it fits the boxes the developers were asked to put in place. Doing so would make stupid bureaucractic policy mistakes into cultural catastrophes. I legitimately fear two agents of oppression: 'Sorry, it's policy' used to excuse cruelty, and 'the software doesn't have a place for me to put that.'

You believe strongly in this.

Why didn’t you use a larger font size to ensure everyone sees your message?

I was able to increase the font size of the whole page in two taps in mobile Safari.

And I reduced it. The aurhor had no say in the matter. He could have written in italics if he knew how, or ALL CAPS, and there would be little I could do about it. He could have worn a sandwich board and paced up and down a thoroughfare, but I would not have seen him.

People adapt their behavior to their communication media instinctively and continually, and are as routinely deliberately controlled thereby.

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