>>40Your notion that an
encoding standard
AND EACH AND EVERY LIBRARY THAT READS AND/OR WRITES IT ARE THE FUCKING VERY SAME THING is fucking WRONG.
EVERY LIBRARY THAT READS AND/OR WRITES IT
Just think for a moment on what UTF-8 relies. Unicorns? Goodwill? Some kind of magic it runs on? Could it be code? Maybe some abstract interface? Maybe it consists of..unicode libraries?
Now, remove these libraries, and UTF-8 becomes an autistic fantasy, without concrete implementation and ecosystem of libraries it will never be a standard or even a convention.
Abstracting UTF-8 from the implementation is the classic reification fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)#Vicious_abstractionismWilliam James used the notion of "vicious abstractionism" and "vicious intellectualism" in various places, especially to critique Immanuel Kant's and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's idealistic philosophies. In The Meaning of Truth, James wrote:
Let me give the name of "vicious abstractionism" to a way of using concepts which may be thus described: We conceive a concrete situation by singling out some salient or important feature in it, and classing it under that; then, instead of adding to its previous characters all the positive consequences which the new way of conceiving it may bring, we proceed to use our concept privatively; reducing the originally rich phenomenon to the naked suggestions of that name abstractly taken, treating it as a case of "nothing but" that concept, and acting as if all the other characters from out of which the concept is abstracted were expunged. Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than a means of advance in thought. … The viciously privative employment of abstract characters and class names is, I am persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind.[7]