[account42]

Emoticons are not the same as emojis. For one they allow for more expression or personal style by having different variants, e.g. :-) vs :) or for absolute maniacs: (:

They are also not limited to what some consortium and a couple of megacorporations think you should be able to express.

[thaumasiotes]

> or for absolute maniacs: (:

To be fair, Unicode allows for that variant too: https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face

[jiggawatts]

Agreed, but Unicode allows me to express the emotion that I most commonly feel when working in the IT industry: disapproval.

    ಠ_ಠ

[account42]

Yes and that's still an emoticon made from creative use of pre-existing characters rather than an emoji specified in Unicode.

[oneeyedpigeon]

They also lack semantics. There are downsides as well as up.

[account42]

Usage rather than specifications determine semantics and due to the points in my previous post those often disagree for Unicode emojis.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I'm glad you recognise the value of usage when it comes to emoticons vs. emoji...

[layer8]

Emojis also severely lack semantics. They are specified in terms of what they should visually depict, not what they are supposed to mean.

[arccy]

emoji lack clear semantics too, consider the eggplant.

[oneeyedpigeon]

I think there's a difference. The code point will always mean "eggplant", it just happens that the concept can be interpreted in different ways according to context—just like the word itself. But ":-)" can only ever mean "colon minus rparens" before further interpretation.

[account42]

Actually, according to Unicode, "-" doesn't mean minus - U+002D is hyphen-minus.

And as for the eggplant, your semantics-as-specified are useless when 99.9% of the usage has a different intended meaning due to the inherent lack of expressiveness in a corporate-approved emoji language.

[skydhash]

What’s it called is syntax, what it’s means is always context dependent. That’s why we invented formal notation, so that we can have context free interpretation (it’s bundled with its semantic so you don’t need to apply some context to it)