UTF-8 Everywhere
Looking at the .NET parts of the manifesto, I just have to roll my eyes:<p><i>Both C# and Java offer a 16 bit char type, which is less than a Unicode character, congratulations. The .NET indexer str[i] works in units of the internal representation, hence a leaky abstraction once again. Substring methods will happily return an invalid string, cutting a non-BMP character in parts.</i><p>While theoretically true, for most practical purposes, this reeks of a USA/American/English bias and lack of real world experience.<p>You know what? I want to know that the <i>text</i> "ØÆÅ" is three characters long. I dont want to know that it's a 6-byte array once encoded to UTF8. Anywhere in my code telling me this is 6 characters is <i>lying</i>, not to mention a violation of numerous business-requirements.<p>When I work with text I want to work with text and never the byte-stream it will eventually be encoded to. I want to work on top of an abstraction which lets me treat text as text.<p>Yes, their are cases where the abstraction will leak. But those cases are very far and few in between. And in all cases where it doesn't, it offers me numerous advantages over the PHPesque, amateurish and <i>incorrect</i> approach of treating everything as a dumb byte-array.<p>It's not. It's text in my program. It's text rendered on your screen. It's just a byte-array when we send it over the wire, so stop trying to pretend text isn't text.<p>This manifesto is wildly misguided.