Re:Emojis paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere
by lokedhs on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @10:02AM
(#25137479)
I said they thought they were smart. I'm not going to judge whether it actually was smart based on the situation then.
That said, UTF-8 was already 4 years old by the time Java came out. Surrogate pairs was added to Unicode in 1996, one year prior to the release of Java.
I joined Sun Microsystems around that time, and Unicode really wasn't a thing in the Solaris world for a few more years, so the fact that people wasn't aggressively pushing good Unicode support at the time is understandable. People just didn't have much experience with it.
That said, UTF-8 was already 4 years old by the time Java came out. Surrogate pairs was added to Unicode in 1996, one year prior to the release of Java.
I joined Sun Microsystems around that time, and Unicode really wasn't a thing in the Solaris world for a few more years, so the fact that people wasn't aggressively pushing good Unicode support at the time is understandable. People just didn't have much experience with it.