Putting emoji in unicode was a mistake.
@arguil Well, for one, 32 bits were supposed to be more than enough to accomodate any past, present and future writing systems, even fictional ones, but, thanks to emoji, we have almost run out of codepoints already.
@josemanuel @wolf480pl this is a joke right? Is this whole thread a joke and I'm the only one who can't tell?
Social media was a mistake.
@arguil
it's not a joke, it's a genuine sentiment.
I do not claim to have a rational argument for it. @josemanuel seems to have one but I couldn't verify it.
I'll try to think of why I think putting emoji in unicode was a mistake, but for now it's just a vague feeling.
@wolf480pl
> I do not claim to have a rational argument for it. @josemanuel seems to have one but I couldn't verify it.
When I said we had almost run out of codepoints, I didn't mean that literally, BUT my point was, and still is, that we were promised to never, in thousands of years, run out of them, and the fact is that, at the current rate of growth, we might even see, in our lifetimes, the need for a new, 64-bit coding system. And all because someone thought it would be a good idea to use a bunch of redundant images as if they were letters and important symbols.
Also, emoji defeated the design principles of Unicode. Why do we have several shades of a hand gesture when Unicode explicitly avoids that kind of thing for letters (i.e., there are no codepoints for the cursive letter a, as opposed to the roman or bold versions. In other words, Unicode separates the symbol from its representation, but with emoji we have the complete opposite)?
@wolf480pl @arguil Oh, here's another argument: the use of emoji sets us back some 2500 years, when alphabets (a short list of abstract symbols that could be combined to form meaningful words and sentences) started beating ideograms (a _huge_ list of complicated symbols that vaguely resembled real world objects, each with their own meaning) as the superior form of written communication. Who in their right mind would want to go back to that?
@glitch The Japanese had to invent syllabaries to make Chinese somewhat palatable. That really means nothing. Ideograms are still the inferior writing system.
@josemanuel @glitch @arguil I think.that requires an argument independent of "we stopped using them".
"Chinese still uses them" is not an argument that ideograms are good, just like hospitals still using WinXP isn't an argument that that OS is good. But "we're no longer using them" doesn't mean what we have now is better (see Saturn V)
Kanji is very effective in instantly communicating what is meant, albeit at the cost that when something falls outside the designated list, you basically get a combination of two characters that are meant to be read as one word.
It also generally means that people can express themselves while taking up less space in places limited to them.
The disadvantage is mostly that it can be a pain to learn and with such a massive list of characters, there's going to be characters that resemble each other.
(Japanese Twitter as the chief example is often far more descriptive than English twitter since for them, 280 characters isn't that big of a deal, while English twitter is a challenge in trying to communicate as much with as few words as possible.)
@josemanuel @arguil
yeah that too.
Emoji originally developed to signal non-verbal communication through text channels. But they covered things that are hard to express through language, like :) and :P.
But if you start adding emoji for nouns, instead of - you know - emotions, then yeah that's a step backwards.