On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Daniel Wislocki wrote:

> Actually what I've found is that most Japanese don't use Unicode at
> all, but one of the other encodings like Shift-JIS.

Actually, the more technical Japanese folks seem to actively hate
Unicode, though I've never gotten a solid answer as to why that didn't
involve confusing glyphs with their representations. (Which I guess I
can see how it might upset you if your name came out with the wrong
version of the character--but besides being damn rare, we have solutions
for this.)

But I've done tons of Unicode stuff, and really, -Ku and the usual
libraries (iconv etc.) cover most of what you need, and if you need much
more, you're probably ending up with custom code anyway.

For the other stuff, take a careful look at how you're doing scaling.
It may be that with Java or whatever you're just going to run into the
same limits when you get ten times bigger, anyway, and when you switch
to what you need to do to really scale, it makes little difference what
you use because you're distributed amongst a huge number of hosts and
processes anyway.

And also consider using Ruby for some stuff, and not others. You don't
have to use it for everything, and in fact you probably don't want to.
But there are a fair number of cases out there where it's pretty darn
convenient and fast.

> (I live and work in Japan.)

Shibuya, myself.

cjs
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Curt Sampson        <cjs / cynic.net>         +81 90 7737 2974
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