this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
372 points (95.1% liked)
Programmer Humor
27214 readers
992 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You complain about ASCII filenames but a few of the examples are obviously Unicode, namely using emoji, well outside of the ASCII character set. But since you've brought up Unicode file names, let me introduce you to bidirectional text!
If you use Hebrew or Arabic, some of your directories or files will have right-to-left text in them. This is a recipe for disaster.
If in English you'd have "C:\Users\Adam\Documents\Research\Paper.pdf", which breaks down to:
In Hebrew you'd have: "C:\משתמשים\אדם\מסמכים\מחקר\מאמר.pdf", which breaks down to:
The entire path goes backwards, and the ".pdf" extension is visually attached to the "Users" folder if the text is rendered naively. It's insane. Fortunately many GUI shells nowadays separate each path item so they can't get intermixed like this. Example:
But still, if you copy a path into plaintext, it will still visually look wrong, and there is literally nothing that anyone can do about it. This is the correct way to render this text.
Exact same issues occur in Arabic and the few other RTL languages usedin the world. It's a massive pain.
Edit: oh, and on commandline on Windows, the required characters aren't even available by default so you get this lovely thing
Make it vertical? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯