Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

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> Man, i wish everything was UTF-8 so we iconv would not be needed anymore. Too bad its defined in POSIX.

I wish nothing was in UTF-8 and UTF-8 was relegated to properties files. There are codebases out there with complete i18n and l10n in more languages that most here have ever worked with where there's zero Unicode characters allowed in source code files (with pre-commit hooks preventing committing such source code files).

Bruce Schneier was right all along in 1998 or whatever the date was when he said: "Unicode is too complex to ever be secure".

We've seen countless exploits based on Unicode. The latest (re)posted here on HN was a few days ago: some Unicode parsing but affecting OpenSSL. Why? To allow support for internationalized domain names and/or internationalized emails.

Something that should never have been authorized.

We don't need more of what brings countless security exploits: we need less of it.

Relegated Unicode to translation/properties file, where it belongs.

Sure, Unicode is great for documents, chat, etc.

But everything in UTF-8? emails? domain names? source code? This is madness.

I don't understand how anyone can admire the fact that HANGUL fillers are valid in source code are somehow a great win for our industry.

Let me guess, English is your native language?

This is the obvious complaint, but ASCII is the only common subset of the various encoding schemes. For some things like programming languages and protocols I think it make sense to have an ASCII constraint. You can express pretty much any sound phonetically using the Latin alphabet.

The last part is so obviously wrong as to be silly, off the top of my head voiced lateral fricatives are used in some of my home languages that would not be possible to explain in simple latin alphabet terms.

How about a tonal language? Or a whistling language? Or a clicking language?

I agree that grandparent is wrong in their statement about the ability to express sounds.

I don't, however, understand why you would need support for unicode chars in the source code. To support unicode identifiers? Why would we want that?

I am non-native English speaker. Almost always we work in an international setup, so I already have to reeducate graduates from university not to use localized variable names and not to put in localized comments.

English is the de facto standard in the programs and it's mostly due to technical constraints and historical leadership in programming languages (well, there was French version of Pascal for a while, don't get me started on that ;) ). I think this made us communicate across the borders better. We already have problems of properly naming things, even limited to English, so why would we want to increase the misunderstandings?

Why would you want to increase misunderstandings by forcing people to communicate exclusively in a language that they are strictly less proficient in, when everybody on the team is much more proficient in a different language?

This is blatant North American and Western European bias. It makes sense as a policy in those regions, but it is desperately necessary that computing standards do not prevent the rest of the world from participating on as equal terms as possible.

No, it is not blatant "North American and Western European bias".

I am Bulgarian, living in Bulgaria, a small country in Eastern Europe. My native language is Bulgarian. I also know English, Russian, and a little bit of French and Turkish.

I do not want to write, or read source code written in Bulgarian, or Russian or French, or Kiswahili, or Japanese etc. I want to use one single language for that. It currently happens to be English for historical reasons.

Supporting unicode in source code, will lead to language fragmentation, and will limit my ability to participate, and to understand everything already build by others.

Supporting Unicode in itself does not nudge anyone towards localizing their codebase.

Please consider that as a (presumably young or young-ish) European, you have access to different educational resources, and are exposed to a cultural context where English is the lingua franca. As a Bulgarian, or any other European nationality, the only foreign language you truly need to learn to get by almost anywhere on the continent is English.

There are many, many countries and places on Earth where English is a significant barrier, due to being much further away, geographically and culturally.

While English is unavoidable after a certain level (just like French is unavoidable for a chef, or Italian is for a musician), it is crucially important that the barrier to entry does not also necessarily come with huge a language barrier up front.

Most people in Tibet only speak Tibetan. They also need to use smart phones. They type texts on their phones to communicate with their friends. They simply cannot use Latin alphabet for doing that.

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