I'm not expecting PG to plan for hurt feelings. I'm expecting him simply not to go out of his way to hurt feelings. For no particular reason he took a technical time-to-release issue and turned it into a political correctness issue (and therefore made the whole debate around it political).
Simply take this paragraph:
"Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway."
And change it to:
"Currently, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. At some point (I don't know when) I or someone else on the Arc team will probably figure out how to take advantage of it."
That's all. Say less. Stick to the technology. Avoid politics. Controversy avoided.
The whole Unicode brouhaha was triggered by Paul's description of the issue. If he had said: "Arc doesn't support Unicode yet but I expect it would be easy and I welcome patches" then it would have not been an issue at all.
Instead, he said: "I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway."
There was no reason to take a swipe at the "kind of people" who care about internationalization, which is to say:
* people who are not mono-lingual anglophones
* people who want to build real-world applications
Why shouldn't people in those categories be interested in Arc? Why should they be excluded? And why treat it as a matter of political correctness rather than just a technological decision?
Paul threw the first punch and the blogosphere punched back.
Furthermore, his general tendency to divide and conquer the programing world in that way is why there was already a huge pool of haters ready to pounce on him. Every essay of his implies that there are people who get it and people who don't and one can distinguish between them by seeing which people agree with him and which do not.
He only needed to say: "Arc does not yet support Unicode" and the whole thing would have been avoided.
So should I infer that the only reason UTF-8 is mentioned is that the reader APIs do not let you select the codec? Or is even that provided in which case it is accurate to say that Arc supports Unicode-in-general?
Do I understand correctly that Arc strings are sequences of octets?
If so: I really don't want to be a negativity guy but it seems like every language that has made an 8-bit string the default string type has regretted it later because it is so painful to change it without breaking code. Okay, Paul says that he won't mind breaking code. Maybe he means it, but it doesn't make any sense to me to knowingly and consciously repeat a design mistake that dozens of other people have made and regretted.
It really just takes one day to get this right. You need to distinguish between the raw bytes read from a device and the true string type (which needs to be 21 bit or greater). You need a trivial converter from one to the other (which you can presumably steal from MZScheme) and back.
That's it. You get this right at the beginning and you never have to backtrack or break code.
My apologies in advance if this post is based on incorrect premises. I'm trying to help.
Simply take this paragraph:
"Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway."
And change it to:
"Currently, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. At some point (I don't know when) I or someone else on the Arc team will probably figure out how to take advantage of it."
That's all. Say less. Stick to the technology. Avoid politics. Controversy avoided.