I to this day still have to Google tons of stuff, even very simple things; sometimes it’s just hard to remember that function’s name or whatever, it’s no big deal.

Programming didn’t click for me until I actually built something. Just a little command line game. Eventually after a certain point I realized: oh my god I can do anything! (with enough time)

You’ll get there, but try working on something bigger with zero stakes where you can feel out how code you write in one place ripples out to other places.

Man, Unicode is one of those things that is both brilliant and absolutely absurd. There is so much complexity to language and making one system to rule them all ends up involving so many compromises. Unicode has metadata for each character and algorithms dealing with normalization and capitalization and sorting. With human language being as varied as it is, these algorithms can have really wacky results. Another good article on it is https://eev.ee/blog/2015/09/12/dark-corners-of-unicode/

And if you want to RENDER text, oh boy. Look at this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/