Last week,
Paul Graham and Robert Morris announced the release
of Arc to a
firestorm of negative commentary.
At one point, it seemed as if
those on programming.reddit.com couldn't wait to find new blog posts to submit that
tore into Arc.
There have been many complaints, but much of it has been on the
lack of Unicode support.
It's something to be expected, but as I thought about it, I wondered why.
It's not my intent here to draw negative attention by questioning the conventional wisdom of the status quo,
but I fear that may happen. I simply want to ask the obvious:
How many projects have you participated in where Unicode was an explicit or implicit requirement?
What percentage of the total do those make up? In the remainder of cases, would something
like Arc have been useful to you?
For the vast majority of projects I've worked on, having support for 9+ bit character sets or curly
quotes was not a requirement, and Arc would have been useful on the ones that didn't have a specific
language or platform requirement. (I understand if your work takes you there, but also understand
many of ours don't.)
So I'll ask again: should we be
slaughtering useful tools, or sacred cows?
Keep it civil and topical please. It's nothing but an observation and a question, not a statement of
religious belief spread with the fervor of a crusader.
Hey! Why don't you make your life easier and subscribe to the full post
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