This is one of the most interesting HN post+comments I've read yet, in part because it mixes technology with culture and history. It also takes advantage of the diverse HN community and their own native languages.
As an American (English speaker) who has studied French, Hebrew and Japanese, I can appreciate the complexity of input balanced against standards and the needs of programmers.
It's a fucking hard problem, but I don't think that blaming the unicode consortium is the right place to do so. They seem to be doing a reasonably good job in trying to get everything in, and really they need input from outsiders to do this well. It requires people with linguistic & technical backgrounds which is probably why random governments may have a harder time providing input.
Further from all the points people are making about uppercase/lowercase/hyphenation across languages, it sounds to me like there really needs to be a super-standarized open source implementation of the things you want to do with text, not just purely encode it. I don't think that exists, and it might be a good place for the unicode people to branch to.
As an American (English speaker) who has studied French, Hebrew and Japanese, I can appreciate the complexity of input balanced against standards and the needs of programmers.
It's a fucking hard problem, but I don't think that blaming the unicode consortium is the right place to do so. They seem to be doing a reasonably good job in trying to get everything in, and really they need input from outsiders to do this well. It requires people with linguistic & technical backgrounds which is probably why random governments may have a harder time providing input.
Further from all the points people are making about uppercase/lowercase/hyphenation across languages, it sounds to me like there really needs to be a super-standarized open source implementation of the things you want to do with text, not just purely encode it. I don't think that exists, and it might be a good place for the unicode people to branch to.