Oh man, this article is 20 years old. Still relevant though so go read it if you still aren’t sure about Unicode!
I would take this with a grain of salt. None of the programming languages I have used require this level of in-depth knowledge. Certainly not modern C++.
Did you see the date on the article?
No. I can only read date in the YYYY/MM/DD format.
It’s still true that if you have a bunch of bytes and don’t know their encoding, you don’t really know what characters you have.
Good thing print debugging is still going strong!
I code across multiple systems, particularly Windows and Linux. A lot of data involved. These encoding issues are rare. Granted, I’m more on the backend of things and more numerical-data driven. I’d expect a completely different set of headaches for web dev and such. But that just highlights the issue I have with the claim that every programmer must know this. Hence why the comment about taking it with a grain of salt.
I have seen a lot of people interested in learning but get turned away by this level of complexity. This imo is unnecessary. Programming is first and foremost about logic, this level of in-depth knowledge requirement is what we have been doing away with in higher-level programming languages.
