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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

Pretty clearly, "every software developer" doesn't need to understand Unicode with this level of familiarity, much like "every programmer" doesn't need to know the full contents of the 114 page Drepper paper. For example, I work on a GUID-addressed object store. Everything is in term of bytes and 128-bit UUIDs. Unicode is irrelevant to everyone on my team, and most adjacent teams. There is lots of software like this.

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There seems to be quite large segments of developers working on functionality which "handles text" as immutable whole blobs, in which case one really doesn't have to know anything about unicode.

However, as soon as you want to look into the text contents of the objects of that object store and handle parts of it, even in the very simplest way (e.g. checking whether the stored object contains some character, or whether two text messages stored in that object store are the same) then you can't treat them as bytes anymore, and all the concerns listed in this article suddenly become relevant for your team.

Yes, exactly.

Glad I'm not the only one who was irked by this, and I do need to know a lot about Unicode for my job!

I believe there actually are topics that every software developer ought to know something about, but this isn't one of them. My list would be things more like, the difference between a constant-time algorithm and a quadratic-time one.

Every programmer don't have to remember all things in this article, but they should remember that Unicode (or text system in the wild) is actually complex so they should research as needed.

Sure, that's a reasonable take.

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