I think it could be interesting to see the "karma-change tally" (don't know how to call it) on stories, people and comments.

The rationale is that to me, there's quite a difference between a comment that has 1 karma because there was no upvotes/downvotes and one that has 1 karma because there was 20 upvotes and 20 downvotes.

So, we could have something like:

5-3=2 points by username

IMHO, it's not an issue of implementation. It's an issue of design.

If PG explicitly says "ok, I don't have time to do Unicode stuff now, but my idea is that a string is a sequence of characters, regardless of how a 'character' is represented", then somebody can go ahead to change Arc Unicode-clean (it won't be much work assuming MzScheme has support of Unicode).

If PG says "the language Arc (not mere an implementation) doesn't support beyond Ascii", then I feel that PG reserves that part of design (e.g. it may conflate byte-array and multibyte strings, or it may use richer character representation than unicode codepoint, such as a character object that holds the sequence of base char + modifiers, or it may hold raw byte array plus encoding info). In that case I hesitate to change Arc code without understanding PG's intention.

Complaining about Unicode support doesn't mean people haven't been reading pg correctly, it means they disagree about the importance of it.

I don't see how lacking it makes the language any more artistic.

Edit: and characterizing people as pedants for wanting a useful feature is silly and unproductive.

Dudes, really...

PG just released an entirely new dialect of lisp for web programming, he's mentoring about 20 startups right now, and runs Hacker News... "Oh, and can you add Unicode support, it would only take 2 or 3 days..."

I know that not having Unicode supported in your web language is inconvenient, and at times is a show-stopper. But really. Give the guy a break. If PG doesn't want to "spend a single day on character sets". Don't ask him to spend a day on character sets.

If you want Unicode support in Arc, code it up and submit it.

Maybe you don't want to generate HTML but instead an RSS feed, a SVG image, JSON data, etc.

So a hardwired table-HTML output isn't good.

Users care if their name is zoe (with an accent on the e), or if they want to discuss prices of things in euros or GBP.

I wrote a php forum a while back. You wouldn't believe the number of emails telling me that the gbp sign doesn't show up properly when they post a comment.

Mistake #9: "I'll spend lots of time making it marginally prettier instead of building out features"

To all sarcastic commenters:

Hey, dudes: he built a bunch of cool and famous software, some of which you are using without paying a dime for, and even making money with.

He has no blog. Can't be found on Facebook. Apparently doesn't even like surfing web. But there is a wiki page about him and he gets recognized while walking down the street.

His name is Richard Stallman. What is YOUR name? What have YOU built?

That's why you stole his username? :P

Digg is winning on what? The war for the most retarded users and comments on a news article?