[Sesse__]

Sure, not all posts want to be the end-all of the topic. :-)

And yes, the Joel post is a good introduction, if a bit old by now. Notably, of course, it doesn't say anything about _processing_ Unicode text. (E.g., don't sort by code point, don't break in the middle of a grapheme cluster, etc. etc.) But I believe that this is outside the scope of his intention.