Dear Programmers, Please Learn to Read Before You Speak: In Defense of Arc

Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.<p>I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.<p>Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive.

I can not believe you linked to yourself!<p>It does not speak well of an author's arguments when they rely on generalities -- "you don't know everything" and "programmers can't communicate". As for Leibniz, Euclid and Newton -- Gauss was by all accounts more productive, more important, more fundamental than any of those guys; and a famously poor communicator.<p>The smooth, poorly reasoned prose of this article bears the mark of a real English major. The manifest lack of respect for the mores of the programming community is the sure sign of a n00b -- or a Java/.NET programmer -- who can not see a new computer technology in the context of the life of the field, because they are unaware of it.

He actually spent time to write that bullshit? I really hate articles that offense their readers.<p>All these people he mentions were lead to create something out of need or by a strike of genious, and I don't see this guy getting either of both.<p>Unicode is not a luxury, is a need.<p>Supported or not by Arc at this version or in the future, is another issue and if the community needs it, a totally another one.<p>But leaving a language without builtin support for Unicode, its destiny not far should it be from ending up like what is to day to writting C++ in Windows, which is a tottally NIGHTMARE to handle strings as there more than 10 different types.<p>I don't think anybody attacked Arc or its creatos by stating their "dumb" needs!

<a href="http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they" rel="nofollow">http://www.koziarski.net/archives/2007/12/1/they</a><p>Interestingly enough, in the three months the above link has been around, I've found it germane to something like four threads on Hacker News.<p>This is open source, people. If you need something, add it yourself. This is a Lisp for God's sake, you can actually add syntax to the language!<p>In general, grumble, but don't be obnoxious about gaps unless you're paying the developer for the privilege.<p>The Tao of Steve applied to free and open-source software:<p>1) Be desireless; 2) Be excellent; 3) Be gone.

If I really wanted to procrastinate, I would find all the blog posts complaining about lack of unicode, and count how many times a non-ASCII character was used.

If I remember correctly, Ruby doesn't have Unicode support either. Shit, some languages don't even have built-in strings.

"In other words, CS guys, you must (gasp!) acknowledge that you don't know everything."<p>Is he still gasping? (He forgot his closing tag.)<p>Oh that's right, CS guys don't know everything.

It's really curious that so many people are so pessimistic about something they get for free...<p>Me simply is playing around a little every now and then, and it's giving me much, much fun! It brings me back the feeling when I first started learning Lisp!<p>So my summary is clear: nice!, great!, fun!! (And I'll omit a 'hallelujah' here...)

boring. don't read.