[Manishearth]

Again.

Yes, "it jumped the shark when the pizza slice showed up". However, that doesn't imply that it did everything wrong. The notion of multi-codepoint characters is necessary to handle other languages. that is a solved problem, it's just that programmers mess up when dealing with it. Emoji may be a mistake, but the underlying "problems" caused by emoji existed anyway, and they're not really problems, just programmers being stupid.

We had multiple per-language encodings. It sucked.

[carapace]

I don't agree that the notion of multi-codepoint characters is necessary, I don't think it was a good idea at all. I submit [1] as evidence.

Whatever this mess is, it's a whole thing that isn't a byte-stream and it isn't "characters" and it isn't human language. Burn it with fire and let's do something else.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/documentation/unicode/6485/characte...

(In reality I am slightly less hard-core, I see some value in Unicode. And I really like Z̨͖̱̟̺̈̒̌̿̔̐̚̕͟͡a̵̭͕͔̬̞̞͚̘͗̀̋̉̋̈̓̏͟͞l̸̛̬̝͎̖̏̊̈́̆̂̓̀̚͢͡ǵ̝̠̰̰̙̘̰̪̏̋̓̉͝o̲̺̹̮̞̓̄̈́͂͑͡ T̜̤͖̖̣̽̓͋̑̕͢͢e̻̝͎̳̖͓̤̎̂͊̀͋̓̽̕͞x̴̛̝͎͔̜͇̾̅͊́̔̀̕t̸̺̥̯͇̯̄͂͆̌̀͞ it is an obvious win.). Even when it doesn't quite work... (I think I'm back to "fuck Unicode" now.)

[Manishearth]

I submit Hangul and all the Indic scripts as counterevidence. Not all scripts can easily avoid multicodepoint chars.