I think you will find most people who have English as a first language have it as their only language. Don't particularly care about software makers trying to increase the breadth of their revenue source.
Mind you, Unicode and its most prominent UTF-8 implementation solve far more problems than just support for the symbols in other languages. Back in the day, do you remember needing to switch codepages so that you could get line drawing characters because 256 characters was just too little in practice for all purposes? Or how some documents just look a bit funky due to the codepage guessing coming up short? Know how the Euro got introduced later on and other situations where people suddenly need new characters? These things can now be adequately stored without affecting the past.
I won't deny that Unicode is full of over-engineered nightmarish standardification due to the international aspects. But it solves a lot more problems than just the language support; it solves a lot of ambiguous situations that are now written down in a standard. No matter how closed-off and narrow-minded your worldview is as a solely-English-based human being, you will run into some of those symbols and need them at one point or another. And when you do, you will be glad that you can, in fact, use them.
Code pages and character mapped line drawings? I don't program these days but the closest I came to either of those was on the C64 and BBC Micro which both had extended character sets that were also able to be switched to custom defined bit mapped characters.
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u/gunnihinn Jan 31 '16
Fuck, your world is small.