Things would probably be slightly better if Unicode wasn&#x27;t so difficult to support properly. For example, good luck getting your UTF-8 text output to render correctly in a terminal window under all circumstances (try combining diacritics or funny letters like &quot;𖥶&quot; - can you copy&#x2F;paste that using the mouse?), or in a text editor like vi, Emacs with terminal UI. Using UTF-8 typically means having to think long and hard about filtering input&#x2F;data, normalization and stuff like <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;reports&#x2F;tr36&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.unicode.org&#x2F;reports&#x2F;tr36&#x2F;</a> . If you don&#x27;t, you&#x27;ll run into such issues eventually even if you think your code needs to handle only a few &quot;western&quot; languages.