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Post by @robpike.io

Earlier in the thread

Flüpke @fluepke@chaos.social

Counting the characters in ONE CHARACTER remains an open problem in computer science.

Satirical meme with the caption “STOP DOING COMPUTER SCIENCE” based on “STOP DOING MATH”. It mocks the fact that computer science cannot define what a character is, let alone a string. A diagram shows several encodings for the trans pride flag and its breakdown into Unicode codepoints, each of which is roughly explained. C programmers are made fun of by the "optional C memory-safety byte" at the end of the encoded octet strings. Python devs are mocked by the optional byte order mark in front of the encoded octet string. The meme ends: “They have played us for ABSOLUTE FOOLS.”

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Martin Schröder 🇺🇳 @oneiros@ruhr.social

@fluepke
@robpike had a hand in this... 😉

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@robpike.io @robpike@cosocial.ca

@oneiros @fluepke I would counter that human language is too intricate, variable, and nuanced to be captured in simple nerd-originating rules, and I'm fine with that. UTF-8 codified a tiny subset of that space.

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@robpike.io @robpike@cosocial.ca

@oneiros @fluepke Also, it's worth pointing that the way human language is handled with computers today is staggeringly better than it was back in the 1960s when I started playing with them. It's far from perfect but it used to be very close to totally batshit pointlessly lazily bad, inconsistent, and nationalistic to boot. Even if we just talk about EBCDIC and ASCII and exclude the dozens of other unrelated distinct coding systems, it was appallingly bad.

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