MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)

It's true that Sun are just as bad, but that doesn't make Microsoft any better. And
specifically it doesn't mean Mono's even lousier support is any good.

I did single out Mono. I'm sure the Microsoft CLR has its problems, but it can manage to fall
properly asleep and it does, (in current versions) more or less get Unicode handling correct,
or close enough. What we have isn't a good clone of a terrible system, but a poor clone of a
not-so-great system.

Crossing out UCS-2 and writing UTF-16 in your documentation (when you even remember to say
something more specific than just "Unicode") isn't enough. In any case, UCS-2 tends to get
people into a mindset where they start thinking of a character, a code point, a code unit and
a glyph as more or less the same thing, precisely the type of attitude that UTF-8 has been
beating out of people developing in C or Perl. .NET inherits from Win32 certain APIs that
implicitly make this mistake, and fixing them makes it awkward and unsettling. As with Java,
the C# "wide character" built-in type is almost entirely useless, because it can only store a
UTF-16 code unit, and in a high level language you almost never /want/ a UTF-16 code unit but
instead need a character, which won't fit.

Exactly as I said, the suggested "fix" is that you can upgrade to some future version (Python
2.6 isn't out) and use this new API to work around the problem.

If this was some minor library being worked on by a volunteer in their spare time, fair
enough, we can always just avoid that library - but people are proposing that we write large
and important programs in this language now.

Look what it took to even get this concession, 18 months later, that the next version would
have a fix, someone had to grab Guido at a conference and basically shake him up and down so
he'd go investigate.

In a toy language, or a prototyping language, these sorts of problems are easily forgivable.
But today people want to recommend Python for writing real software that will go out to end
users or into production systems. Indeed most Linux distributions include such software, and
you'll find it running on your machine easily enough, it's the program with the GUI that
freezes whenever it's doing any work, or the one that wakes up needlessly every few
milliseconds, chewing through the whole laptop battery in an hour and a half - and far from
being concerned about this total failure, the Python developers hail it as a success.