emojis everywhere, seeking understanding / clarity / opinion

[John Ralls]

> On Apr 6, 2018, at 11:11 PM, Wm via gnucash-devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> background:
> 
> gnc 3.0 allows emojis in places I think inappropriate
> 
> e.g.
> 
> account names
> account codes
> securities
> 
> and offers them in places it shouldn't
> 
> e.g.
> 
> dates
> numbers
> 
> ===
> 
> the thing I'm wondering about is if I am totally out of date or just being realistic.
> 
> Argument A: emojis are everywhere, everyone knows what they are, they all mean the same thing, you're an old, out of date, fart, blah [3]
> 
> Argument B: emojis are non standard, depend on platform, environment and are by definition inconsistent and can't be reported on, used for tax purposes, used internationally or generally be used for significant financial communication [1]
> 
> 
> ===
> 
> I also think there is something else (Trump supporters really should just leave the room now, it'll save you apoplexy).
> 
> it would make more sense to me if, long term, gnc allowed other character sets (words have meaning) rather than trying to allow ill defined jumbles of high bit chars in plain text xml files [4]
> 
> my suggestion is that words that are understandable to the user, their community in general, their tax and government authorities, etc are more useful than emojis
> 
> ===
> 
> and from a personal POV I just don't like them and think their use inappropriate in a broad project like gnc that tries to be agnostic.
> 
> ===
> 
> half for fun is this (.)(.) female breasts, an overweight man's chest or a pair of eyes ?  We think we know when we use them and they're often fine amongst friends ... but do they belong in an accounting application as accounting is, usually, formal in one sense or another and often used for communicating to people outside of our immediate social circle.
> 
> or to put it another way, do we want to be the accounting program that allowed someone to use a picture of a turd for the inland revenue and then used that in their tax return :)
> 
> ===
> 
> [1] I accept, absolutely, that a nice smile face (I tend to stick to text, myself) is pretty much universal these days; my argument is that when you send me your emoji it doesn't necessarily appear the same to both of us, mainly because there are a whole bunch of people owning [2] these things.
> 
> [2] since some emoji sets are proprietary, how does that fit in with gnc as an open source accounting project ? <-- I'm not invoking Stallman weirdness so much as practical stuff like: are we all seeing the same thing?
> 
> [3] return *fun* insults by e-mail please otherwise you'll get put on the international wait-a-bit time zone dysfunctional list too :)
> 
> [4] did a dev look at that and think, "super idea, we *must* include non-text chars in our text based xml file.  absolutely.  best idea ever hashtag" or whatever the current parlance is.

Filtering for meaning is Way Too Hard. It would be too hard just in English, every additional localization squares it.

Besides, if a user wants to have an emoji as (part of) an account name, isn’t that the user’s business? It’s all Unicode, so from a text processing standpoint no different from Chinese.

Regards,
John Ralls