Whoever started putting Unicode everywhere instead of sticking it to word processing destroyed an entire generation.
That said, I have always assumed that these problems we get with emoji also have equivalents that show up in other languages, it's just that we speak English and so only see them with Emoji. Maybe it's good that Emoji were included because it actually stresses our Unicode implementations!
And this is all before you introduce text that is written right-to-left like arabic scripts.
Just my 2 cents, but if ASCII includes, among other things, "characters" for linefeed, 4 unspecified "device control characters", EOT (End of Transmission), and a character to ring a bell, then I guess its okay to put some smileys and flags into Unicode.
The problem is the massive quantity of LTR stuff that is in RTL languages still (English words, programming language keywords, math, music, certain conventions, ...)
Anyway yes multi-character glyphs occur in various forms (like accents, sometimes: é, ñ...) but I always thought that the burden of supporting them was on the fonts, not on the Terminal or the Unicode standard itself.
I am well aware, and supportive, of the need to encode the entirety of human script and written symbolics in a unified format.
And the reason why my terminal doesn't need anything beyond basic modifying diacritic marks and single-codepoint symbols (like blocks and line characters for text-user-interfaces) is because I do not use it to write prose is a variety of languages, I use it to communicate with a machine, administrating systems, designing backend software, and analysing machine-written logfiles.
I am NOT a native English speaker. I cannot even write my name with ASCII letters.
To me, the situation looks exactly the reverse of your comment, I see the urge of putting Unicode everywhere as an essentially white savior syndrome that nobody asked for.
I want to be able to write name in Word or other text processing software, but nothing more. The command line, network protocols, etc. There are not the realm of fancy dynamic length characters. I want simple glyphs with fixed size bytes mapping. I don't want to embed a complicated Unicode parsing library in every software.
When I'm in the realm of programming, I'm not here to do politics. I'm here for the most reasonable, straightforward, working solution for a set of problems. If that means accepting a fixed set of characters, I'm 100% fine with that.
The cat is out of the bag, and if your software doesn’t support Unicode. you’re limiting what your users can do with it. Maybe that’s fine with you and a certain program, but it’s not for a lot of people.
You also don’t need to embed full Unicode parsing/support libs if you just treat the user’s input as a byte stream. When programmers try to get fancy and ToUppercase() a byte blob with no regard for what that blob represents - that’s when we have problems.
So how does one write, say, the backend for a reservation system managing thousands of hotel room bookings every hour, all over the world? I'm pretty sure there will be ALOT of customers with non-ascii names, not to mention adresses and hotel names. How does one write a system like twitter, where messages in every known system of writing need to be be sent, processed, stored, delivered, commented, displayed?
And btw. network protocols and backends work with arbitrary data all the time: Audio & video streaming, networked gaming, sensor readouts, images. Even plaintext webpages are often transmitted in compressed form. So if these systems are the "realm" of arbitrary bytestreams to encode everything from classical music, over sha-hashes, to gifs of dancing dogs, they may as well encode a few hundred different systems of writing and some smiley faces.
Take something as simple as names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Poop emoji might be dumb, but it doesn’t seem to hurt anything and if it makes developers support Unicode better, awesome.
Clearly the article is demonstrating that this hasn't come true.
Turning Unicode into clipart collection is not.
Or that I can't type my address, which contains ø?
Because lots of families don't look like that, and people want to use emoji that reflect them and theirs
Flip phone emojis started in mid-1990s as carrier-specific custom characters on unused areas on Shift-JIS, and initially the implementations were largely the same. Wireless carriers then realized it could be used as differentiators, like by adding more specific mojis, colored mojis and animated GIF emojis, and then each strains of emojis that carriers offer grew into different dinosaurs over a decade and half until forcibly unified into a common ground in 2010s basically by Apple and Google.
Apple got into the emoji game when they entered Japanese market with iPhone 3G on SoftBank, and Google then helped it standardized in Unicode. At that exact point everyone was on the same page. And at next instant, they realized that they are not differentiating on emoji.