Interesting that I actually don't need to know this stuff. I think you'll find that MOST developers actually don't need to know this stuff. People seem to forget that the vast bulk of developers are for corporate and in house development, single language, being English.
I know this stuff because I like to understand how this works, but for all the dev's under me, there are probably a thousand concepts that I want them to understand before they start tackling encoding beyond knowing when to call the correct function.
As being from a non English speaking country I have had to deal with many instances of issues caused by this way of thinking. Before unicode happened to be widely applied, using Linux was 100% harder for us. So sometimes it may see that some things aren't fundamental but they might actually be, you simply don't know it yet.
...and then you get strange bug reports that your code doesn't work on Windows machines of co-workers from other countries because they have non-ASCII characters in their login name, or worse, the problem makes it out into the wild (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-14-windows-usernam...).
I would actually recommend this text http://utf8everywhere.org/ over the OP, it offers a much simplified view and solution on the mess that was international text encoding in the past. It's better to just forget about codepages and ASCII, and just use UTF-8 everywhere.
Well, yes, I'd they know that texts have an encoding, how to detect it, and what functions to call to convert between them, I agree they don't need to understand how they actually work.
That said, I think the "we work in English" is a mistaken belief. Clients, employees, products, suppliers, etc, all will have names with non-ASCII characters.
My name is André; send me a letter or email with my name garbled, and I will mock your company publicly and, if you are a tech company, heavily consider dropping you for incompetence.
And then you acquire a Japanese subsidary, or get bought by a Korean company, or hire someone with a Polish name, or you work in a country that has an official language that is not representable in ASCII, such as New Zealand.
Comments
Interesting that I actually don't need to know this stuff. I think you'll find that MOST developers actually don't need to know this stuff. People seem to forget that the vast bulk of developers are for corporate and in house development, single language, being English.
I know this stuff because I like to understand how this works, but for all the dev's under me, there are probably a thousand concepts that I want them to understand before they start tackling encoding beyond knowing when to call the correct function.
As being from a non English speaking country I have had to deal with many instances of issues caused by this way of thinking. Before unicode happened to be widely applied, using Linux was 100% harder for us. So sometimes it may see that some things aren't fundamental but they might actually be, you simply don't know it yet.
...and then you get strange bug reports that your code doesn't work on Windows machines of co-workers from other countries because they have non-ASCII characters in their login name, or worse, the problem makes it out into the wild (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-14-windows-usernam...).
I would actually recommend this text http://utf8everywhere.org/ over the OP, it offers a much simplified view and solution on the mess that was international text encoding in the past. It's better to just forget about codepages and ASCII, and just use UTF-8 everywhere.
Well, yes, I'd they know that texts have an encoding, how to detect it, and what functions to call to convert between them, I agree they don't need to understand how they actually work.
That said, I think the "we work in English" is a mistaken belief. Clients, employees, products, suppliers, etc, all will have names with non-ASCII characters.
My name is André; send me a letter or email with my name garbled, and I will mock your company publicly and, if you are a tech company, heavily consider dropping you for incompetence.
And then you acquire a Japanese subsidary, or get bought by a Korean company, or hire someone with a Polish name, or you work in a country that has an official language that is not representable in ASCII, such as New Zealand.