You can’t just assume UTF-8

Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed.

At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development.

However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other.

And one of the biggest problems is the most simple: computers do not agree on how to write letters in binary.

Cal Paterson

For most users, character encoding issues are not something they have to deal with. Programmers and other people who deal with the lower levels of computing, however, deal with this way more often than they should.