> A few months ago I asked a class of 140+ first year Computer Science > programme and Joint programme students - > > Who has heard of Unicode?
I do a similar survey whenever I teach the remedial I18N and Unicode classes at Amazon. When I ask if software developers *ever* received any formal education on internationalization or on character encodings, results are almost universally negative--more like zero percent than 20%. Which is one reason why we have to spend a significant amount of effort maintaining a training and education program. I suspect I'm not alone in the industry in thinking that educational establishments could do a better job of preparing developers with at least the basics of Unicode, character encodings, and internationalization. Addison Phillips Principal SDE, I18N Architect (Amazon) Chair (W3C I18N WG) Internationalization is not a feature. It is an architecture. > -----Original Message----- > From: Unicode [mailto:unicode-boun...@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Andre > Schappo > Sent: Wednesday, December 30, 2015 8:16 AM > To: Unicode Public > Subject: Unicode in the Curriculum? > > A few months ago I asked a class of 140+ first year Computer Science > programme and Joint programme students - > > Who has heard of Unicode? > > about 20% of the students raised their hands. > > then I quickly followed it with the question > > …and who understands Unicode? > > Every single student whose hand was raised put it down. > > Some of these students were really experienced programmers, having > programmed from an early age. > > Many times over the years I have informally asked students studying in the > UK (1st, 2nd, 3rd year undergrad, MSc, PhD, home students, international > students) what they know of Unicode and the vast majority of the time they > know nothing or next to nothing. > > The fundamental problem, as I see it, is that the teaching of Unicode is not > on the curriculum of Schools, Colleges or Universities in the UK. IMHO, It > should be! > > I do wherever and whenever I can, incorporate Unicode in my teaching e.g. > recently I gave an introductory lecture on Regular Expressions and in my > examples I demonstrated, using Unicode text and patterns and not just ASCII. > > One such example I used was — /^人+鸭人+$/ > > This regex is a reference to Hongkong and the visiting giant floating rubber > duck😄 > > My regex examples also include Emoji and Egyptian Hieroglyphs😄 > > Does anyone on this list teach Unicode at an Educational Establishment, > School, or College or University? > > André Schappo >
