Comments on y-intercept blog: Diversity of Characters

"It is sometimes cheaper to buy more capacity t...

2007-03-29T00:07:00.000-06:00
"It is sometimes cheaper to buy more capacity to achieve uniformity than to try to translate everything."

I sympathize with the sentiment that it is just easier to use an inefficient protocol and to buy more equipment. Equipment is cheap.

For that matter, I agree with RFC 2277 that requires all Internet protocols to identify the encoding used for character data with UTF-8.

I am not sure if taking the easy out really is the best route. It seems to me that the method where you simultaneously develop systems that work with different character sets and protocols will ultimate be more robust and faster than one developed with a one size fits all protocol.

Being a programmer, I found this post very interes...

2007-03-28T11:30:00.000-06:00
Being a programmer, I found this post very interesting. My company grapples with the issues of producing a broad variety of data that works both for our vendors and customers. It is sometimes cheaper to buy more capacity to achieve uniformity than to try to translate everything.

You might find the writings of Paul Graham to be interesting. Torn between his love and training in art and in computer languages, he ended up making it big in the run-up to the dot com bubble burst. He's now a venture capitalist, but he has a deep love of computer languages and espouses more pure languages as being the most efficient in the long run.