Lucky our printing technology has moved past moveable type and mechanical typesetting in recent years. My printer is not that new and can already print all extended Latin characters and maybe even some emojis.

From time to time, people ask for D to support Unicode operator code points. I decided it wasn't a good idea, as it makes code more difficult to type in, and there's the problem of text processing programs' (like editors, printers, etc.) support for non-ASCII being rather unpredictable.

> maybe even some

I.e. unreliable :-/

Change is not progress.

It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.

Obviously we're not. Icons and emoji aren't characters -- you don't need them to write words and their meanings are relatively self-evident as opposed to letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.

And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.

> their meanings are relatively self-evident

All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.

> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.

Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.

> arbitrary squiggle

The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.

> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.

Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.

Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: 凹凸

Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?

Very few Chinese characters are pictograms and even those are extremely stylized.

The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals.

They are nothing like emoji.

No, they're both on the same continuum. The original Chinese characters were emoji, which literally means "picture characters" in Japanese, and emoji today are already evolving beyond their original pictorial meanings -- for example, an eggplant isn't just an eggplant anymore.

> The original Chinese characters were emoji

This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way!

I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration.

You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.

> Here are the Chinese characters for concave and convex: 凹凸

Really? Funny that neither of those shapes is convex.

Unicode is primarily concerned with standardizing existing characters in the majority of the language systems of the world. The big exception are emojis and a small number of usefull icons, the power button icon comes to mind. Its story of addition to unicoe was shared on Hacker News some years ago. As far as I know the only area of invention and growth are emojis.

If this were true, the first page of every book would consist of nothing but special glyphs for product placement.