this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
341 points (98.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
32356 readers
1245 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's as long as it needs to be unique
Sure. OK. How about we put the Greek alphabet at the lower code points and the Latin alphabet higher up, and now you might argue that Latin takes up more space than necessary.
Potential counterpoint: "This is stupid. Latin goes in the lower code points, it always has, it always will. Who's putting Greek down there??"
Well, if Greece had invented computing as well as, let's say, democracy that's very likely how things would be.
In that timeline, someone is using exactly the same line on you "[The representation of Latin text in memory i]s as long as it needs to be unique." and you're annoyed because your short letter to Grandma is using far too much space on your hard drive.
Genuine question, how many applications are bottlenecked by the size of text files? I understand your analogy, but even a doubling in size of all your utf-8 encoded files would likely be dwarfed by all the other binary data on your machine, right?
Oh true. I'd be so annoyed because I somehow wrote a whole letter to Grandma in English which she couldn't read.