Hacker News will bias against emoji. Certainly there is a question of whether the consortium should keep adding emoji, which ones to add, whether emoji should be encoded in the first place, etc.

For perspective, this update also brings 4316 new CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) characters, which "pushes the number of CJK ideographs to over 100,000" (quoting from the release).

Not that its what should determine the ideal length, computing power has gone up significantly faster than the number of characters in Unicode (chatGPT gives me characters ^ 7 = flops).

It does all seem utterly ridiculous. Both in terms of what's included and in terms of what isn't included. Pictographic-language-by-committee is probably the worst way of designing anything. ~4000 emoji, the choices range from infantile to offensive (to some).

We've had to rebuild multi-gigabyte database tables to change collations so people could use emojis in silly places. But hey, at least we'll be able to include a Hairy Creature emoji soon. Sigh.