Hacker News Reader

> There are so many ways to do something and every way is freaking wrong!

That's life! The perfect way does not exist. The best you can do is be aware of the tradeoffs, and languages like C++ absolutely throw them in your face at every single opportunity. It's fatiguing, and writing in javascript or python allows us to uphold the facade that everything is okay and that we don't have to worry about a thing.

View on HN

JS and Python are still old enough to have been created when Unicode was in its infancy, so they have their own share of problems from using UCS-2 (such as indexing strings by what is now a UTF-16 code unit, rather than by a codepoint or a grapheme cluster).

Swift has been developed in the modern times, and it's able to tackle Unicode properly, e.g. makes distinction between codepoints and grapheme clusters, and steers users away from random-access indexing and having a single (incorrect) notion of a string length.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com