Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Thou shalt grok Unicode!

Working programmers simply must grok Unicode!

I thereby propose the following course of study:

  1. Read "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)", by Joel Spolsky

  2. Read "There Ain't No Such Thing as Plain Text", by Jeff Atwood

  3. Read "On the Goodness of Unicode", by Tim Bray

  4. Read the aforementioned Wikipedia article on Unicode

  5. Perl programmers, read: "Unicode-processing issues in Perl and how to cope with it", by Ivan Kurmanov

  6. Write a UTF-8 version of "Hello, World!" in each programming language that you ordinarily use. (See below.)


Speaking of which, wanna know how to say "Hello, world!" in a wide variety of natural languages? Here's the list, with the language names omitted. See how many you can identify, and brag in the comments how awesome you are!

  • Hello, World!

  • 世界、こんにちは!

  • مرحبا ، العالم!

  • 你好,世界!

  • Bonjour, le monde!

  • Hallo, welt!

  • Ciao, mondo!

  • 안녕하세요, 세계!

  • Olá, mundo!

  • Здравствуй, мир!

  • Здравей, свят!

  • Hola, mundo!

  • Halló, Heimur!