The hopeless task of the Unicode Consortium

Randall Munroe, author of xkcd, discussing Unicode on the Triangulation podcast:

I am endlessly delighted by the hopeless task that the Unicode Consortium has created for themselves. " They started out just trying to unify a couple different character sets. And before they quite realized what was happening, they were grappling with decisions at the heart of how we use language, no matter how hard they tried to create policies to avoid these problems. It's just a fun example of how weird language is and how hard human communication is and how you really can't really get around those problems. " These are really hard problems and I do not envy them.

Reminds me of Jeffrey Snover's remark about problems vs dilemmas: problems can be solved, but dilemmas can only be managed. Unicode faces a host of dilemmas.

Regarding Munroe's comment about Unicode starting out small and getting more ambitious, see the next post for a plot of the number of characters as a function of time and of version number.

• Why Unicode is subtle
• Three ways to enter Unicode characters in Windows
• Projecting Unicode to ASCII