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!

8 comments:

Basic Japanese said...

Josh, are you using traditional Chinese UTF-8 font? If you are, please recommend a good one!

Josh Glover said...

Bugger if I know. Here are the fonts that I have installed:

: jglover@jglover; equery list media-fonts/
* installed packages
media-fonts/aquafont-2.7-r2
media-fonts/aquapfont-2.5-r1
media-fonts/arphicfonts-0.1.20060513
media-fonts/baekmuk-fonts-2.2-r2
media-fonts/corefonts-1-r2
media-fonts/cronyx-fonts-2.3.1-r2
media-fonts/dejavu-2.15
media-fonts/efont-unicode-0.4.2-r1
media-fonts/encodings-1.0.0
media-fonts/essays1743-1.0
media-fonts/font-adobe-75dpi-1.0.0
media-fonts/font-alias-1.0.1
media-fonts/font-cursor-misc-1.0.0
media-fonts/font-misc-misc-1.0.0
media-fonts/font-util-1.0.1
media-fonts/freefonts-0.10-r3
media-fonts/gnu-gs-fonts-other-6.0
media-fonts/gnu-gs-fonts-std-8.11
media-fonts/hunkyfonts-0.3.1
media-fonts/intlfonts-1.2.1
media-fonts/ja-ipafonts-0.0.20040715
media-fonts/jisx0213-fonts-20040425-r2
media-fonts/kochi-substitute-20030809-r3
media-fonts/lfpfonts-fix-0.83-r2
media-fonts/lfpfonts-var-0.84
media-fonts/mikachan-font-9.1
media-fonts/monafont-2.90-r2
media-fonts/mplus-fonts-2.2.4
media-fonts/sazanami-20040629
media-fonts/sharefonts-0.10-r3
media-fonts/shinonome-0.9.11
media-fonts/terminus-font-4.20
media-fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10-r3
media-fonts/ttf-gentium-1.0.1
media-fonts/unifont-1.0-r3
media-fonts/urw-fonts-2.1-r2

Anonymous said...

Hvar er "Halló, Heimur!"!?

Unknown said...

Bah, this Unicode thing is just a fad and will disappear once you troglodytes become enlightened enough to use EBCDIC.

Also, BSD is dead! Long live big-endianness!

MentatJack said...

I am so awesome!

Josh Glover said...

@birkirb: Of course I do... now. ;)

@rzoz: You are clearly insane.

@mentatjack: I guess you are a spambot, but I forgive you since you are a Mentat and all.

MentatJack said...

Heh, this is Steven, you know me.

Your instructions were "See how many you can identify, and brag in the comments how awesome you are!"

for the record, I was able to identify 8.

sorry for being belligerent.

Unknown said...

Hey big playa,

I have no idea what your up to these days. I know you're a Dad, and I suspect you are an excellent father :D

I miss you often my friend, especially when I'm singing along with a Luda or Clipse song and I work Q Hawkins into the lyrics in the way we mastered and made so classically famous in the halls of INCOGEN. In that spirit I had to send ya this:

http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?artist=961097&vid=116154

I bet you can find a few places to search/replace Q :D

I've been coding a bunch. Just a silly ole PHP/MySQL framework for content management. Its been fun.

Peace homey,

Cdog