[nuopnu]

But comparing something to something else and it being easy, doesn't make it easy by itself.

Paraphrasing the joke about new standards: we had a problem, so we created a beatiful abstraction. Now we have more problems. One of the new problem being normalization.

It doesn't undermine the good that Unicode brought, but you can't say to have included some unilib.h and use its functions without understanding all the Unicode quirks and its encodings, because some of the parameters wouldn't even make sense to you, like the same normalization forms.

[Arnt]

Wait. There are two possible cases:

1. Either your restrict yourself to the kind of text CP437/MCS/ASCII can handle (to name the three codecs in the blog posting). In that case unicode normalisation is a noop, and you can use unicode without understanding all its quirks.

2. Or you don't restrict the input, in which case unicode may be hard, but using CP437/MCS/ASCII will be incomparably harder.

[nuopnu]

A rocket can take you to the Moon. Is it easy to operate? Or to learn how to? To maintain it and prepare on the ground?

Not just it would be harder, but you couldn't get into space without it at all, so that got comparatively easier.

Is it still all easy, though?